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'...