Algorithms To Live By

Business & Money

Brian Christian

Management & Leadership

Picador

For the first time in history, we are interacting with computers so sophisticated that we think they're human beings. This is a remarkable feat of human ingenuity, but what does it say about our humanity? Are we really no better at being human than the machines we've created? By mimicking our behaviour and conversation, computers have recently come within a single vote of passing the Turing Test, the widely accepted threshold at which a machine can be said to be 'thinking' or 'intelligent'. In this witty, wide-ranging and inspiring investigation, Brian Christian takes the recent and breathtaking advances in artificial intelligence as the opportunity to rethink what it means to be human, and what it means to be intelligent, in the 21st century. Competing head-to-head with the world's leading AI programmes at the annual Turing Test competition, he uses their astonishing achievements as well as their equally fascinating failings to reveal our most human abilities: to learn, to communicate, to intuit and to understand. And in an age when computers may be steering us away from these activities, he shows us how to become the most human humans that we can be. Drawing on science, philosophy, literature and the arts, and touching on aspects of life as diverse as language, work, school, chess, speed-dating, art, video games, psychiatry and the law, "The Most Human Human" shows that that far from being a threat to our humanity, computers provide a better means than ever before of understanding what it is.

Most Human Human: A Defence of Humanity in the Age of the Computer

History

VIKING

<p>This is a strange, fertile, and sometimes beautiful book. It has been said that man creates images of himself, then comes to resemble the images. Something like this seems to be going on with the computer. Brian Christian writes with a rare combination of what Pascal took to be two contrary mindsets: the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse. He takes both the deep limitations and halting progress of artificial intelligence as an occasion for thinking about the most human activity - the art of conversation</p>

The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Algorithms to Live By, Leader as Healer, Staring Down the Wolf [Hardcover] 3 Books Collection Set

Nicholas Janni

Mark Divine

William Collins/LID Publishing/St. Martin's Press Ltd

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Books by Brian Christian