Tom Griffiths introduces himself: I’m a cognitive scientist — a professor of psychology and computer science at Princeton University — so I think about minds and mathematics every day. But we are in an interesting moment where people who aren’t professional cognitive scientists are grappling with the same questions: Can machines think? Is it possible to describe minds using mathematics? What are the limits of different approaches to building a mind? Will we be able to create super-human artificial intelligence? These are questions that have come into focus in the last few years with the creation of chatbots that can hold conversations and solve challenging problems, but answering the questions we have about modern AI requires going further back into the past. In writing the book, I hoped to give readers the context for this moment and some of the language for talking about it, as well as highlighting the stories of discovery that brought us to this point and that suggest possible paths...

It's an easy assumption (which I made) that this book is fantasy as it involves a ghost hunter, but I'm calling it SF, as at the time of publication at the end of the nineteenth century, the Society for Psychical Research was treating such phenomena as a subject of scientific investigation, and there has been plenty of SF where the 'science' has been anything but correct. This is part of MIT Press's Radium Age series, which brings back titles from the period when science fiction was just starting to emerge. Often writing from this period was stodgy and no longer easy to read: arguably with little other entertainment available in the home, there was far less need for good writing than is the case now. But short stories of the period can often work better - think how well, for instance, the Sherlock Holmes stories hold up. Although the Herons (in reality mother and son team, the bizarrely named Kate O'Brien Ryall Pritchard and Hesketh Hesketh-Pritchard) aren'...

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Caleb Scharf received the 2022 Carl Sagan Medal while director of astrobiology at Columbia University and is currently the senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA’s Ames Research Center. He has written several previous books and is a frequent contributor to Scientific American and Nautilus magazine. He divides his time between Silicon Valley and New York City. His new book is  The Giant Leap : Why Space is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life. Why science? I still feel the sense of great wonder at the world that I did as a child. For me science isn’t about some harsh, clinical deconstruction of things, it’s a type of contemplative discipline that amplifies that wonder and helps create a better sense of connection to this vast, crazy, messy universe we’re part of. I also love toying with ideas and asking questions, and I’m in awe of all the ways we humans continue to invent to help answer those questions.  Why this book? I said to my agent that I wanted to write a book ...

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

There are plenty of novels featuring time travel out there, but this is one of the more interesting ones. In a 2040s lab, owned by a tech billionaire, a pair of brilliant scientists have discovered a kind of time travel - but it's different from the usual variety. There's no physical travel - the person simply experiences a short passage of time from their past. But it's not a memory: the device sends their mind into the ether and somehow (thanks to the wonders of negative energy) they are 'really' present for the 90 seconds limit of the visit. However, there's no control over the destination time - Beth, the central character - is intensely focused on finding some way to control this, left with dwindling resources and without the help of her husband who was killed in a car accident. So far, a little bit 'meh' as time travel goes - it might be more real than a memory, but the experience appears to be the same as a perfect memory (that third rule is '...