A Year of Reading: Machines That Think reviewed by Katherine Roberts
I love the serendipity of allowing random books to arrive in my life from unexpected sources... this month's offering is a non-fiction title picked up from a stall at our local Apple Pie Fair. I went for a slice of the giant apple pie, and came home with rather more to digest than I'd bargained for! 'Machines That Think' is part of a New Scientist series written by multiple human experts in the field. Subtitled 'Everything you need to know about the coming age of Artificial Intelligence', this book practically jumped into my hands. On checking the copyright page, I was rather disturbed to see that it was published in 2017, which is ancient history where technology and AIs are concerned. However, if you study the dawn of computing, it's clear these clever little programs have been around a lot longer than you'd think. The first chatbot (named Eliza, after Eliza Dolittle in the play 'Pygmalion') was developed in 1966 as an artificial psychoanalyst ...