Mathematical Intelligence - Junaid Mubeen ***

This is a strange one. It's sort of about AI and making it better, and it's sort of about how wonderful mathematics is (and mathematicians are) and why real maths not like the boring stuff we do at school. Whether or not you think this might appeal I would advise skipping the painfully long introduction (36 pages, but it feels like more).

When it comes to the main text, Junaid Mubeen splits down the way humans do things and artificial intelligence doesn't into seven headings: estimation, representations, reasoning, imagination, questioning, temperament and collaboration. The first of these is by far the best, stressing the way that humans don't actually work numerically like computers beyond relatively small numbers. Of course we can do the sums for bigger numbers, but that's where it becomes an effort, where we more naturally deal with approximation.

In each section, Mubeen is looking at what the limitations are for AI, how humans do it and how we can learn from what mathematicians do. This last part was for me by far the least interesting (and that's as someone with a Masters in an applied maths subject) - I can't see it appealing much except to mathematicians or ex-mathematicians like Mubeen.

The bits on AI and its limitations were quite interesting, though there are now a lot of books on this subject - and since reading Elena Esposito's Artificial Communication, I think many such books frame the problem incorrectly. There is some of that here - Mubeen seems to assume it is possible to move from current AI's approach to actual artificial intelligence (and to think that self-driving cars are close to being feasible in the real world, as opposed to California) - but having said that, the seven areas are quite insightful and help underline how far AI is from actual intelligence.

An interesting book in principle, then, but I didn't enjoy it because the mathematical focus didn't work well and was a distraction from the more interesting parts.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

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, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

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...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog