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Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind
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Author: Hans P. Moravec
This is science fiction without the fiction--and more mind-bending than anything you ever saw on Star Trek. Moravec, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, envisions a not-too-distant future in which robots of superhuman intelligence have picked up the evolutionary baton from their human creators and headed out into space to coloniz...
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Lessons from the Future: Making Sense of a Blurred World from the World's Leading Futurist
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Author: Stan Davis
Lessons from the Future contains some of the most visionary business thinking of the moment, including mind-stretching pieces on the information economy, the foundations of wealth, the new bio-economy, connectivity, emotional bandwidth and mass customisation. Lessons from the Future also includes a new article by Stan Davis reflecting on his own wo...
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The Age of Spiritual Machines : When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
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Author: Ray Kurzweil
How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we'd better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Kurzweil, artific...
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Darwin Among the Machines : The Evolution of Global Intelligence
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Author: George B. Dyson
Here's a mesmerizing account of the evolution of machines and thoughts about machines, woven into a story about the evolution of intelligence. Darwin Among the Machines is not so much about how today's intelligence came to be, but about how it may further develop as humanity and computer grow closer together. George Dyson tells the story largely th...
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Artificial Minds
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Author: Stan Franklin
An encyclopedic but nonetheless compellingly readable overview of the history of Artificial Intelligence. It doesn't require a computer background in artificial intelligence, but it doesn't insult your natural intelligence either. There may be better books on the subject, but I found this to be just the right mixture of history, theory, cognitive p...
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The Society of Mind
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Author: Marvin L. Minsky
For some artificial intelligence researchers, Minsky's book is too far removed from hard science to be useful. For others, the high-level approach of The Society of Mind makes it a gold mine of ideas waiting to be implemented. The author, one of the undisputed fathers of the discipline of AI, sets out to provide an abstract model of how the human m...
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The Universe in a Nutshell
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Author: Stephen Hawking
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Stephen Hawking, science's first real rock star, may be the least-read bestselling author in history--it's no secret that many people who own A Brief History of Time have never finished it. Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell aims to remedy the situation, with a plethora of friendly illustrations to help reade...
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Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
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Author: Steven Johnson
An individual ant, like an individual neuron, is just about as dumb as can be. Connect enough of them together properly, though, and you get spontaneous intelligence. Web pundit Steven Johnson explains what we know about this phenomenon with a rare lucidity in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Starting with the w...
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Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
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Author: Francis Fukuyama
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama made his now-famous pronouncement that because "the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves," history as we knew it had reached its end. Ten years later, he revised his argument: we hadn't reached the end of history, he wrote, because we hadn't yet reached the end of science. Arguing that the great...
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The Next Fifty Years : Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century
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Author: John Brockman (Editor)
Scientists love to speculate about the direction research and technology will take us, and editor John Brockman has given a stellar panel free rein to imagine the future in The Next Fifty Years. From brain-swapping and the hunt for extraterrestrials to the genetic elimination of unhappiness and a new scientific morality, the ideas in this book are ...
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Robots: Bringing Intelligent Machines to Life
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Author: Ruth Aylett
Can we build a robot with humanlike intelligence? What technology is needed to produce the perfect blueprint for the ideal "living" robot? What part will robots play in the future of humanity? Are we risking robot domination of the world? This highly readable volume tells the past, present, and future stories of robots and Artificial Intelligence, ...
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Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
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Author: Gaby Wood
A rich and informative exploration of our age-old obsession with “making life.”
Could an eighteenth-century mechanical duck really digest and excrete its food? Was “the Turk,” a celebrated chess-playing and -winning machine fabricated in 1769, a dazzling piece of fakery, or could it actually think? Why was Thomas Edison obsessed with making a...
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Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life
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Author: Sarah Kember
Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life examines construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture. It takes a critical political view of the concept of life as information, tracing this through the new biology and the changing discipline of artificial life and its manifestation in art, language, literature, co...
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The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
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Author: Manuel Castells
Manuel Castells is one of the world's leading thinkers on the new information age, hailed by The Economist as ""the first significant philosopher of cyberspace,"" and by Christian Science Monitor as ""a pioneer who has hacked out a logical, well-documented, and coherent picture of early 21st century civilization, even as it rockets forward largely ...
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The Next Big Thing Is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business
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Author: Jack Uldrich
Although nanotechnology deals with the very small—a nanometer is 1/80,000th the diameter of a human hair—it is going to be huge. From the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the products we manufacture to the composition of our bodies, everything is made of atoms. And if we can manipulate the atom, then that changes the rules of the game for almo...
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