By John Brockman.
Published by Harper.
576 pages.
Weighing in from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, today’s most forward-thinking minds explore the rise of “machines that think.” Stephen Hawking recently made headlines by noting, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Others, conversely, have trumpeted a new age of “superintelligence” in which smart devices will exponentially extend human capacities. No longer just a matter of science-fiction fantasy (2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Her, etc.), it is time to seriously consider the reality of intelligent technology, many forms of which are already being integrated into our daily lives. In that spirit, John Brockman, publisher of Edge. org (“the world’s smartest website” – The Guardian), asked the world’s most influential scientists, philosophers, and artists one of today’s most consequential questions: What do you think about machines that think?
Table of Contents
- Consciousness In Human-Level AI — Murray Shanahan
- Thinking Does Not Imply Subjugating — Steven Pinker
- Organic Intelligence Has No Long-Term Future — Martin Rees
- A Turning Point In Artificial Intelligence — Steve Omohundro
- AI Is I — Dimitar D. Sasselov
- If You Can’t Beat ’em, Join ’em — Frank Tipler
- Intelligent Machines on Earth and Beyond — Mario Livio
- I, for One, Welcome Our Machine Overlords — Antony Garrett Lisi
- Our Masters, Slaves, or Partners? — John Markoff
- Designed Intelligence — Paul Davies
- The Superintelligent Loner — Kevin P. Hand
- It’s Going to Be a Wild Ride — John C. Mather
- Is Anyone in Charge of This Thing? — David Christian
- Witness to the Universe — Timo Hannay
- Let’s Get Prepared! — Max Tegmark
- “Turing+” Questions — Tomaso Poggio
- An Epochal Human Event — Pamela McCorduck
- Welcome to Your Transhuman Self — Marcelo Gleiser
- We Are All Machines That Think — Sean Carroll
- The Control Crisis — Nicholas G. Carr
- We Built Them, but We Don’t Understand Them — Jon Kleinberg and Sendhil Mullainathan
- We Need to Do Our Homework — Jaan Tallinn
- What Do You Cane What Other Machines Think? — George Church
- Machines Cannot Think — Arnold Trehub
- No “I” and No Capacity for Malice — Roy Baumeister
- Leveraging Human Intelligence — Keith Devlin
- A Machine Is a “Matter” Thing — Emanuel Derman
- I Could Be Wrong — Freeman Dyson
- Why Can’t “Being” or “Happiness” Be Computed? — David Gelernter
- No Machine Thinks About the Eternal Questions — Leo M. Chalupa
- The Singularity—an Urban Legend? — Daniel C. Dennett
- Nano-Intentionality — W. Tecumseh Fitch
- A Beautiful (Visionary) Mind — Irene Pepperberg
- The Colossus Is a BFG — Nicholas Humphrey
- Self-Aware AI? Not in 1,000 Years! — Rolf Dobelli
- Machines Don’t Think, but Neither Do People — Cesar Hidalgo
- Tangled Up in the Question — James J. O’Donnell
- Mistaking Performance for Competence — Rodney A. Brooks
- AI Will Make You Smarter — Terrence J. Sejnowski
- Shallow Learning — Seth Lloyd
- Natural Creatures of a Natural World — Carlo Rovelli
- Three Observations on Artificial Intelligence — Frank Wilczek
- When I Say “Bruno Latour,” I Don’t Mean “Banana Till” — John Naughton
- It’s Still Early Days — Nick Bostrom
- Evolving AI — Donald D. Hoffman
- Machines That Think Are in the Movies — Roger Schank
- Head Transplants? — Juan Enriquez
- AI–AL — Esther Dyson
- Brains and Other Thinking Machines — Tom Griffiths
- They’ll Do More Good Than Harm — Mark Pagel
- Keeping Them on a Leash — Robert Provine
- The Next Replicator — Susan Blackmore
- What If We’re the Microbiome of the Silicon AI? — Tim O’Reilly
- You Are What You Eat — Andy Clark
- AI’s System of Rights and Government — Moshe Hoffman
- The Robot with a Hidden Agenda — Brian Knutson
- Can Submarines Swim? — William Poundstone
- Fear Not the AI — Gregory Benford
- What, Me Worry? — Lawrence M. Krauss
- Design Machines to Deal with the World’s Complexity — Peter Norvig
- The Rise of Storytelling Machines — Jonathan Gottschall
- Think Protopia, Not Utopia or Dystopia — Michael Shermer
- The Limits of Biological Intelligence — Chris Dibona
- Every Society Gets the AI It Deserves — Joscha Bach
- The Beasts of AI Island — Quentin Hardy
- We Will Become One — Clifford Pickover
- An Extraterrestrial Observation on Human Hubris — Ernst Poppel
- He Who Pays the AI Calls the Tune — Ross Anderson
- I Think, Therefore AI — W. Daniel Hillis
- What Will the Place of Humans Be? — Paul Saffo
- The Great AI Swindle — Dylan Evans
- The Odds on AI — Anthony Aguirre
- A New Wisdom of the Body — Eric J. Topol
- From Regular-I to AI — Roger Highfield
- We Need More Than Thought — Gordon Kane
- Are We Going in the Wrong Direction? — Scott Atran
- Two Cognitive Functions Machines Still Lack — Stanislas Dehaene
- Among the Machines, Not Within the Machines — Matt Ridley
- Another Kind of Diversity — Stephen M. Kosslyn
- Narratives and Our Civilization — Luca De Biase
- Human Responsibility — Margaret Levi
- Amplifiers–Implementers of Human Choices — D. A. Wallach
- Make the Thing Impossible to Hate — Rory Sutherland
- Actress Machines — Bruce Sterling
- Call Them Artificial Aliens — Kevin Kelly
- Do Machines Do? — Martin Seligman
- Denkraumverlust — Timothy Taylor
- Analog, the Revolution That Dares Not Speak Its Name — George Dyson
- The Values of Artificial Intelligence — S. Abbas Raza
- Artificial Selection and Our Grandchildren — Bruce Parker
- Really Good Hacks — Neil Gershenfeld
- The Airbus and the Eagle — Daniel L. Everett
- Humanness — Douglas Coupland
- Manipulators and Manipulanda — Josh Bongard
- Are We Thinking More Like Machines? — Ziyad Marar
- Just a New Fractal Detail in the Big Picture — Brian Eno
- eGaia, a Distributed Technical-Social Mental System — Marti Hearst
- The Hive Mind — Chris Anderson
- The Global Artificial Intelligence Is Here — Alex (Sandy) Pentland
- Will Computers Become Like Thinking, Talking Dogs? — Randolph Nesse
- Thinking Machines and Ennui — Richard E. Nisbett
- Naches from Our Machines — Samuel Arbesman
- No Shared Theory of Mind — Gerald Smallberg
- Blind to the Core of Human Experience — Eldar Shafir
- An Intuitive Theory of Machine — Christopher Chabris
- Thinking Saltmarshes — Ursula Martin
- Killer Thinking Machines Keep Our Conscience Clean — Kurt Gray
- When Thinking Machines Break the Law — Bruce Schneier
- Electric Brains — Rebecca Mackinnon
- Robodoctors — Gerd Gigerenzer
- Can Machines Ever Be As Smart As Three-Year-Olds? — Alison Gopnik
- Tic-Tac-Toe Chicken — Kevin Slavin
- AI Will Make Us Smart and Robots Afraid — Alun Anderson
- When Thinking Machines Are Not a Boon — Mary Catherine Bateson
- Justice for Machines in an Organicist World — Steve Fuller
- Don’t Be a Chauvinist About Thinking — Tania Lombrozo
- This Sounds Like Heaven — Virginia Heffernan
- Machines That Work Until They Don’t — Barbara Strauch
- The Moving Goalposts — Sheizaf Rafaeli
- Directionless Intelligence — Edward Slingerland
- Human Culture As the First AI — Nicholas A. Christakis
- Beyond the Uncanny Valley — Joichi Ito
- The Figure or the Ground? — Douglas Rushkoff
- Fast, Accurate, and Stupid — Helen Fisher
- Will They Make Us Better People? — Stuart Russell
- The Value-Loading Problem — Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
- In Our Image — Kate Jeffery
- The Umwelt of the Unanswerable — Maria Popova
- Will They Think About Themselves? — Jessica L. Tracy and Kristin Laurin
- Organic Versus Artifactual Thinking — June Gruber and Raul Saucedo
- Context Surely Matters — Paul Dolan
- How to Prevent an Intelligence Explosion — Thomas G. Dietterich
- Thinking from the Inside or the Outside? — Matthew D. Lieberman
- Soft Authoritarianism — Michael Vassar
- What Will AIs Think About Us? — Gregory Paul
- A John Henry Moment — Andrian Kreye
- Machines Aren’t into Relationships — N. J. Enfield
- The Next Phase of Human Evolution — Nina Jablonski
- Domination Versus Domestication — Gary Klein
- Machines Won’t Be Thinking Anytime Soon — Gary Marcus
- Can We Avoid a Digital Apocalypse? — Sam Harris
- Could Thinking Machines Bridge the Empathy Gap? — Molly Crockett
- Caring Machines — Abigail Marsh
- Engines of Freedom — Alexander Wissner-Gross
- Any Questions? — Sarah Demers
- Thinking Machines = Old Algorithms on Faster Computers — Bart Kosko
- The Disadvantages of Metaphor — Julia Clarke
- A Universal Basis for Human Dignity — Michael McCullough
- Thinking About People Who Think Like Machines — Haim Harari
- Metathinking — Hans Halvorson
- The Value of Anticipation — Christine Finn
- An Ecosystem of Ideas — Dirk Helbing
- The Iron Law of Intelligence — John Tooby
- Thought-Stealing Machines — Maximilian Schich
- Unintended Consequences — Satyajit Das
- It Depends — Robert Sapolsky
- Will Machines Do Our Thinking for Us? — Athena Vouloumanos
- Sorry to Bother You — Brian Christian
- Moral Machines — Benjamin K. Bergen
- After the Plug Is Pulled — Laurence C. Smith
- Monitoring and Managing the Planet — Giulio Boccaletti
- Panexperientialism — Ian Bogost
- When Is a Minion Not a Minion? — Aubrey De Grey
- Not Buggy Enough — Michael I. Norton
- More Funk, More Soul, More Poetry and Art — Thomas A. Bass
- The Future Is Blocked to Us — Hans Ulrich Obrist
- An Immaterial Thinkable Machine — Koo Jeong-A
- Baffled and Obsessed — Richard Foreman
- Who’s Afraid of Artificial Intelligence? — Richard H. Thaler
- I See a Symbiosis Developing — Scott Draves
- Reimagining the Self in a Distributed World — Matthew Ritchie
- It’s Easy to Predict the Future — Raphael Bousso
- Fear of a God, Redux — James Croak
- Tulips on My Robot’s Tomb — Andres Roemer
- Toward a Naturalistic Account of Mind — Lee Smolin
- Machines That Think? Nuts! — Stuart A. Kauffman
- The Future Possibility-Space of Intelligence — Melanie Swan
- Love — Tor Nørretranders
- An Uncanny Three-Ring Test for Machina sapiens — Kai Krause
- Free from Us — Georg Diez
- Flawless AI Seems Like Science Fiction — Eduardo Salcedo-AlbaraN
- Emergent Hybrid Human–Machine Chimeras — Maria Spiropulu
- What If They Need to Suffer? — Thomas Metzinger
- Will We Recognize It When It Happens? — Beatrice Golomb
- Metarepresentation — Noga Arikha
- Envoi: A Short Distance Ahead—and Plenty to Be Done — Dennis Hassabis, Shane Kegg abd Mustafa Suleyman
About the Author
The publisher of the online science salon Edge.org, John Brockman is the editor of Know This, This Idea Must Die, This Explains Everything, This Will Make You Smarter, and other volumes.