Publisher's Synopsis
Artificial intelligence is becoming the most significant single development of our time - promising as it does the end of work and consequent social revolution.;"Clever" machines are playing an increasingly important role in our lives, and with the "Fifth Generation" project in Japan and parallel developments in America and Europe well under way, their impact is growing incalculably.;The author places the emergence of artificial intelligence in its historical and conceptual context. By locating the shift of interest and wa ys of thinking that made "artificial thought" conceivable in the 17th century, he traces the gradual evolution of the hardware that was eventually to support it from the inventions of Schickard and Pascal through those of Leibniz and Babbage to the modern von Neumann computer.;This development is set alongside the developing conceptualizations of reasoning and logic that have in recent years brought these machines to an unnerving kind of life.
