Suggested Readings
(provisional - will be revised)
Numbers and Scale
- On number numbness, from Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, Douglas R. Hofstadter. Basic Books, 1985.
- Chapters 1-2 of Billions and Billions, Carl Sagan. Random House, 1997.
Evolution and the Cosmic Perspective
- Self-referential sentences, viral sentences, and self-replicating structures, from Metamagical Themas, Douglas R. Hofstadter. Basic Books, 1985.
- The cosmic calendar, from The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan. Random House, 1977.
- Cosmos, Carl Sagan. Random House, 1980.
The Acceleration of Technology
- A brief history of intellectual discussion of accelerating change, John Smart, 2004.
- What is the Singularity?, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, 2007.
- The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil. Viking, 2005.
- There's plenty of room at the bottom, Richard Feynman, 1959.
- Evolution's radical
future: a review of Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, James
N. Gardner. Skeptical Inquirer, Jul./Aug. 2006.
With readers'
responses, Letters to the Editor, Nov./Dec. 2006.
- Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, James Gleick. Vintage Books, 2000.
Prospects For Survival
Artificial Intelligence: A Closer Look
- Artificial Minds, Stan Franklin. MIT Press, 1997.
- Prologue, Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence, Hamid Ekbia. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- The Turing Test and the Chinese Room
- Computing machinery and intelligence, Alan M. Turing, Mind, 59, 433-460, 1950.
- A coffeehouse conversation on the Turing Test, from Metamagical Themas, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Basic Books, 1985.
- Minds, brains, and programs, John Searle, 1980.
- Is the brain's mind a computer program?, John Searle, Scientific American 262, pp. 26-31, January 1990.
- Could a machine think?, Paul M. Churchland and Patricia Smith Churchland, Scientific American 262, pp. 32-37, January 1990.
- A conversation with Einstein's brain, from The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, Basic Books, 1981.
- The Chinese Room: just say no!, Robert M. French, Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Cognitive Science Society Conference, 2000.
- Classical AI
- Artificial intelligence: its roots and scope, George Luger.
- From micro-worlds to knowledge representation: AI at an impasse, Hubert L. Dreyfus, 1979.
- Neural Networks and Emergent AI
- Waking up from the boolean dream: subcognition as computation, from Metamagical Themas, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Basic Books, 1985.
- The appeal of PDP, from Parallel Distributed Processing, David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and the PDP Research Group. MIT Press, 1986.
- Excerpt from On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins (with Sandra Blakeslee). Times Books, 2004.
- Robots and Embodied AI
- Excerpt from Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, Valentino Braitenberg, MIT Press, 1984.
- Intelligence without representation, Rodney A. Brooks, 1991.
- Machine Creativity
- Excerpt from The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, Margaret Boden
- Colouring without seeing: a problem in machine creativity, Harold Cohen
- Creativity at the meta-level, Bruce Buchanan
- How could a copycat ever be creative?, Douglas R. Hofstadter