cover image AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence

AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence

Daniel Crevier. Basic Books, $27.5 (386pp) ISBN 978-0-465-02997-6

An engineering professor at the University of Quebec and an entrepreneur in the field of artificial intelligence, Crevier predicts that by 2020 or so, computers will have acquired the critical facility that has evaded all thinking machines to date: the ability to reason on a commonsensical level. Setting aside the commanding implications of that speculation, Crevier focusses on AI social history in this chronicle of the more than 30-year engineering saga of the AI movement, citing observations of such guiding lights in the field as Marvin Minsky, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell. In documenting the jolts and starts of this relatively new area of inquiry (with its overload of acronyms), Crevier diminishes the dislocating effect of confronting an evolution in intelligence greater than our own. Like a sermon preached to believers, this update on the AI movement will appeal mostly to its followers. Library of Science and Small Computer Book Club alternates. (Apr.)