Exploring the cultural results of the current high-tech revolution, an expert in artificial intelligence examines the effect of computers upon art, science, education, and medicine

The Universal Machine: Confessions of a Technological Optimist

Computers & Technology

McCorduck, Pamela

Computer Science

McGraw=Hill

Analyzes the potential and the consequences for the United States of Japan's all-out effort to produce the Fifth Generation of computers within ten years

The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World

Business & Money

Feigenbaum, Edward A.

Industries

Addison-Wesley

The ”official future” says that women are moving toward equality with men. If not in our lifetime, we say, then in our children's.Think again.If the rate of change during the last twenty years holds, it would be 2270 before women and men were equally likely to be top managers of major corporations.In The Futures of Women, Pamela McCorduck and Nancy Ramsey explore four dramatically different alternatives for the coming years. Using a powerful new way of understanding trendsscenario planningthe authors paint these vivid landscapes: ”Backlash,” ”A Golden Age of Equality,” ”Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back,” and Separateand Doing Fine, Thanks.” Each scenario has its own inner logic, firmly grounded in today's events, today's demographic and social trends, and in tomorrow's technological promises, but each one derives from a different combination of the political, social, and economic conditions that could prevail over the next twenty years. The authors' report from the recent UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing further supports their scenarios.The book began as a project for the Global Business Network, a unique consulting firm whose scenario planning methods have helped governments, policymakers, and business leaders create effective strategies for the future. Decisions take on new meaning when we can ”live” for awhile in the world that would result from a course of action we're now considering.Imagine a world where as many women as men are elected to the U.S. Congress. Or, a world where fear for personal safety causes women to don the Muslim chador on Western streets. Or, imagine a national economic policy influenced by giant pension funds whose managers and clients are mainly women. Or, a world where exclusive resorts cater to the sexual needs of busy women executives.Are any of these worlds in our future? Any one of them could be. Only by understanding how we could move from here to therehow the choices we make today could actually play outcan we hope to influence which future comes to pass.The official future won't happen, but one of these four scenarios could. The compelling stories of women living in these futures give women today the reasons and the inspiration to shape their own.

The Futures Of Women: Scenarios For The Twenty-first Century

Politics & Social Sciences

Ramsey, Nancy

Women's Studies

Basic Books

This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia

In the autumn of 1960, twenty-year-old humanities student Pamela McCorduck encountered both the fringe science of early artificial intelligence, and C. P. Snow's Two Cultures lecture on the chasm between the sciences and the humanities. Each encounter shaped her life. Decades later her lifelong intuition was realized: AI and the humanities are profoundly connected. During that time, she wrote the first modern history of artificial intelligence, Machines Who Think, and spent much time pulling on the sleeves of public intellectuals, trying in futility to suggest that artificial intelligence could be important. Memoir, social history, group biography of the founding fathers of AI, This Could Be Important follows the personal story of one AI spectator, from her early enthusiasms to her mature, more nuanced observations of the field.

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

lulu.com

Lulu Press

An intelligent, thought-provoking, and sometimes alarming picture of what the future may hold for women, this book uses scenario planning--a powerful new way of understanding trends--to explore four dramatically different alternatives for the economic and social future of women.

The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century

Grand Central Publishing

The Fifth Generation

Signet

Machines Who Think. A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence.The classic text.

Machines who think: A personal inquiry into the history and prospects of artificial intelligence

W.H.Freeman

Explores the mythical and historical evolution of artificial intelligence, describing the technological advances and their potential and noting the resistance of non-scientists to the perceived threat to man

Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence

Reference

W.H.Freeman & Co.

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Books by McCorduck, Pamela