What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence (Edge Question Series)

Examines the way the Internet has affected society and the way people think and poses the title question to various writers, author, actors, and thinkers who contribute short essays on the subject.;Every year, Edge.org's World Question Center poses a new question to be answered by a group of luminary thinkers--philosophers, scientists, historians and the like. The 2010 question is "How is the Internet changing the way YOU think?" This book collects the responses of more than 150 of the world's most influential minds. Preface : the edge question / by John Brockman -- Introduction : the dawn of entanglement / by W. Daniel Hillis -- The bookless library / Nicholas Carr -- The invisible college / Clay Shirky -- Net gain / Richard Dawkins -- Let us calculate / Frank Wilczek -- The waking dream / Kevin Kelly -- To dream the waking dream in new ways / Richard Saul Wurman -- Tweet me nice / Ian Gold and Joel Gold -- The dazed state / Richard Foreman -- What's missing here? / Matthew Ritchie -- Power corrupts / Daniel C. Dennett -- The rediscovery of fire / Chris Anderson -- The rise of social media is really a reprise / June Cohen -- The internet and the loss of tranquility / Noga Arikha -- The greatest detractor to serious thinking since television / Leo Chalupa -- The large information Collider, BDTs, and gravity holidays on Tuesdays / Paul Kedrosky -- The web helps us see what isn't there / Eric Drexler -- Knowledge without, focus within, people everywhere / David Dalrymple -- A level playing field / Martin Rees -- Move aside, sex / Seth Lloyd -- Rivaling Gutenberg / John Tooby -- The shoulders of giants / William Calvin -- Brain candy and bad mathematics / Mark Pagel -- Publications can perish / Robert Shapiro -- Will the great leveler destroy diversity of thought? / Frank J. Tipler -- We have become hunter-gatherers of images and information / Lee Smolin -- The human texture of information / Jon Kleinberg -- Not at all / Steven Pinker -- This is your brain on internet / Terrence Sejnowski -- The sculpting of human thought / Donald Hoffman -- What kind of a dumb question is that? / Andy Clark -- Public dreaming / Thomas Metzinger -- The age of (quantum) information? / Anton Zeilinger -- Edge, A to Z (pars pro toto) / Hans Ulrich Obrist. The degradation of predictability -- and knowledge / Nassim N. Taleb -- Calling you on your crap / Sean Carroll -- How I think about how I think / Lera Boroditsky -- I am not exactly a thinking person -- I am a poet / Jonas Mekas -- Kayaks versus canoes / George Dyson -- The upload has begun / Sam Harris -- Hell if I know / Gregory Paul -- What I notice / Brian Eno -- It's not what you know, it's what you can find out / Marissa Mayer -- When I'm on the net, I start to think / Ai Weiwei -- The internet has become boring / Andrian Kreye -- The dumb butler / Joshua Greene -- Finding stuff remains a challenge / Philip Campbell -- Attention, crap detection, and network awareness / Howard Rheingold -- Information metabolism / Esther Dyson -- Ctrl + click to follow link / George Church -- Replacing experience with facsimile / Eric Fischl and April Gornik -- Outsourcing the mind / Gerd Gigerenzer -- A prehistorian's perspective / Timothy Taylor -- The fourth phase of homo sapiens / Scott Atran -- Transience is now permanence / Douglas Coupland -- A return to the Scarlet-Letter Savanna / Jesse Bering -- Take love / Helen Fisher -- Internet mating strategies / David M. Buss -- Internet society / Robert R. Provine -- Don't ring me / Aubrey De Grey -- A thousand hours a year / Simon Baron-Cohen -- Thinking like the internet, thinking like biology / Nigel Goldenfeld -- The internet makes me think in the present tense / Douglas Rushkoff -- Social prosthetic systems / Stephen M. Kosslyn -- Evolving a global brain / W. Tecumseh Fitch -- Search and emergence / Rudy Rucker. My fingers have become part of my brain / James O'Donnell -- A mirror for the world's foibles / John Markoff -- A completely new form of sense / Terence Koh -- By changing my behavior / Seirian Sumner -- There is no new self / Nicholas A. Christakis -- I once was lost but now am found, or How to navigate in the chartroom of memory / Neri Oxman -- The greatest pornographer / Alun Anderson -- My sixth sense / Albert-Laśzló Barabási -- The internet reifies a logic already there / Tom McCarthy -- Instant gratification / Peter H. Diamandis -- The internet as social amplifier / David G. Myers -- Navigating physical and virtual lives / Linda Stone -- Not everything or everyone in the world has a home on the internet / Barry C. Smith -- Ephemera and back again / Chris Dibona -- What do we think about? Who gets to do the thinking? / Evgeny Morozov -- The internet is a cultural form / Virginia Heffernan -- Wallowing in the world of knowledge / Peter Schwartz -- One's guild / Stewart Brand -- Trusting nothing, debate everything / Jason Calacanis -- Harmful one-liners, an ocean of facts, and rewired minds / Haim Harari -- What other people think / Marti Hearst -- The extinction of experience / Scott D. Sampson -- The collective nature of human intelligence / Matt Ridley -- Six ways the internet may save civilization / David Eagleman -- Better neuroxing through the internet / Samuel Barondes -- A gift to conspirators and terrorists everywhere / Marcel Kinsbourne -- The ant hill / Eva Wisten -- I can make a difference because of the internet / Bruce Hood. Go virtual, young man / Eric Weinstein -- My internet mind / Thomas A. Bass -- "If you have cancer, don't go on the internet" / Karl Sabbagh -- Incomprehensible visitors from the technological future / Alison Gopnik -- "Go native" / Howard Gardner -- The maximization of neoteny / Jaron Lanier -- Wisdom of the crowd / Keith Devlin -- Weirdness of the crowd / Robert Sapolsky -- The synchronization of minds / Jamshed Bharucha -- My judgment enhancer / Geoffrey Miller -- Speed plus mobs / Alan Alda -- Repetition, availability, and truth / Daniel Haun -- The armed truce / Irene M. Pepperberg -- More efficient, but to what end? / Emanuel Derman -- I have outsourced my memory / Charles Seife -- The new balance : more processing, less memorization / Fiery Cushman -- The enemy of insight? / Anthony Aguirre -- The joy of just-enoughness / Judith Rich Harris -- The rise of internet prosthetic brains and soliton personhood / Clifford Pickover -- Immortality / Juan Enriquez -- A third replicator / Susan Blackmore -- Bells and smoke / Christine Finn -- Dare, care, and share / Tor Nørretranders -- Getting close / Stuart Pimm -- A miracle and a curse / Ed Regis -- "The plural of anecdote is not data" / Lisa Randall -- Collective action and the global commons / Giulio Boccaletti -- Informed, tightfisted, and synthetic / Laurence C. Smith -- Massive collaboration / Andrew Lih -- We know less about thinking than we think / Steven R. Quartz -- An impenetrable machine / Emily Pronin -- A question without an answer / Tony Conrad -- Conceptual compasses for deeper generalists / Paul W. Ewald -- Art making going rural / James Croak -- The cat is out of the bag / Max Tegmark -- Everyone is an expert / Roger Schank. Pioneering insights / Neil Gershenfeld -- Thinking in the Amazon / Daniel L. Everett -- The virtualization of the universe / David Gelernter -- Information-provoked attention deficit disorder / Rodney Brooks -- Present versus future self / Brian Knutson -- I am realizing how nice people can be / Paul Bloom -- My perception of time / Marina Abramović -- The rotating problem, or How I learned to accelerate my mental clock / Stanislas Dehaene -- I must confess to being perplexed / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- Taking on the habits of the scientist, the investigative reporter, and the media critic / Yochai Benkler -- Thinking as therapy in a world of too much / Ernst Pöppel -- Internet is wind / Stefano Boeri -- Of knowledge, content, place, and space / Galia Solomonoff -- The power of conversation / Gloria Origgi -- A real-time perpetual time capsule / Nick Bilton -- Getting from Jack Kerouac to the pentatonic scale / Jesse Dylan -- A vehicle for large-scale education about the human mind / Mahzarin R. Banaji -- Sandbars and portages / Tim O'Reilly -- No one is immune to the storms that shake the world / Raqs Media Collective -- Dowsing through data / Xeni Jardin -- Bleat for yourself / Larry Sanger. Stephen Hawking recently made headlines by noting, 'The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.' Others, conversely, have trumpeted a new age of 'superintelligence' in which smart devices will exponentially extend human capacities. No longer just a matter of science-fiction fantasy (2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Her, etc.), it is time to seriously consider the reality of intelligent technology, many forms of which are already being integrated into our daily lives. In that spirit, John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org ('the world's smartest website'--The Guardian), asked the world's most influential scientists, philosophers, and artists one of today's most consequential questions: What do you think about machines that think? . Steven Pinker considers the internal metal life of robots . Frank Tipler explains how artificial intelligence (AI) will save humanity and colonize space . Martin Rees explores why humans are merely an evolutionary stage on the path to a machine-dominated world . Nicholas Carr examines the challenges of maintaining control over machines . Daniel C. Dennett identifies the true danger of the coming technological 'singularity' . Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek asserts that all intelligence is machine intelligence . Musician Brian Eno suggests that human society remains our most powerful supercomputer . George Dyson argues that genuine creative thinking will always be analog, not digital . Alison Gopnik asks whether machines will ever be as smart as a three-year-old . Richard Thaler thinks human stupidity will always impede artificial intelligence . Wired founder Kevin Kelly calls AIs an 'alien intelligence' . plus contributions from Nobel laureate John C. Mather, Matt Ridley, Freeman Dyson, Douglas Rushkoff, Helen Fisher, Sam Harris, George Church, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Esther Dyson, Nick Bostrom, and others As the world becomes ever more dominated by technology, John Brockmans latest addition to the acclaimed and bestselling Edge Question Series asks more than 175 leading scientists, philosophers, and artists: What do you think about machines that think? The development of artificial intelligence has been a source of fascination and anxiety ever since Alan Turing formalized the concept in 1950. Today, Stephen Hawking believes that AI could spell the end of the human race. At the very least, its development raises complicated moral issues with powerful real-world implicationsfor us and for our machines. In this volume, recording artist Brian Eno proposes that were already part of an AI: global civilization, or what TED curator Chris Anderson elsewhere calls the hive mind. And author Pamela McCorduck considers what drives us to pursue AI in the first place. On the existential threat posed by superintelligent machines, Steven Pinker questions the likelihood of a robot uprising. Douglas Coupland traces discomfort with human-programmed AI to deeper fears about what constitutes humanness. Martin Rees predicts the end of organic thinking, while Daniel C. Dennett explains why he believes the Singularity might be an urban legend. Provocative, enriching, and accessible, What to Think About Machines That Think may just be a practical guide to the not-so-distant future. Weighing in from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, today’s most forward-thinking minds explore the rise of “machines that think.” Stephen Hawking recently made headlines by noting, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Others, conversely, have trumpeted a new age of “superintelligence” in which smart devices will exponentially extend human capacities. No longer just a matter of science-fiction fantasy (2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Her, etc.), it is time to seriously consider the reality of intelligent technology, many forms of which are already being integrated into our daily lives. In that spirit, John Brockman, publisher of Edge. org (“the world’s smartest website” – The Guardian), asked the world’s most influential scientists, philosophers, and artists one of today’s most consequential questions: What do you think about machines that think?