What’s the Big Idea: Artificial Intelligence

“Can Computers Think?” asks the subtitle of this book.

Like its sibling title, ‘What’s the Big Idea: Alien Life‘, this book was great fun to write. Working closely with the brilliant illustrator, Andrew McLynn, was a real pleasure, and explaining the history of attempts to make computers intelligent was a challenge I took on gladly. I enjoy humour, and this book has lots of it.

Of course, this book is now wildly out of date, since all the furious development in this field in the past few years – but I like to think that this book may have inspired some of those now involved in that development.

From the publisher, Hodder Headline:

“Computers can win chess, build cars, play football and explore space. Robots can read handwriting and recognize faces. But can computers really think? And could robots ever rule the world? This book looks at what human intelligence is and asks if computers can ever be truly intelligent.”