Virtual Organisms: The Startling World of Artificial Intelligence Book

Looked at one way, all that has been achieved is some glorified computer programmes and a few robots that stagger around even when you blow one of their legs off. Looked at in another, we stand on the brink of a something that has not happened since the Earth cooled and ceased to be battered constantly by meteors--the creation of a new and unrelated form of life. Mark Ward's report from the front takes what is called a Strong AI position--he dismisses as obscurantism the arguments of philosophers that mechanical creations can never rightly be called alive or conscious. In order to do this, he takes us fluently through the establishment of life on earth and the arguments of those who see it as a constant process of adaptive symbiosis, of partnerships between specialised creatures that together become something else. His cogent argument is essentially that the various sorts of research into machine intelligence, machine perception and computer programmes that imitate reproduction and evolution will come together and produce something like life, and will also help us understand our own evolutionary history. This controversial position may be wishful thinking, but if it proves not to be, Ward has laid the groundwork for ways of coping. --Roz KaveneyRead More