An excellent choice for both the newcomer looking for an introduction to the debate over artificial intelligence and a more...
A synoptic overview of the debate regarding artificial intelligence coupled with a defense of the uniqueness of human consciousness.
The extraordinary progress of neuroscience has led many to believe that a comprehensive explanation of human thought—and its artificial replication—is a theoretical inevitability. First-time author and inventor Tagg argues, however, that the analogy between human cognition and artificial computation is flawed. In fact, computers don’t really seem to think or understand at all in the sense in which humans do, and their often amazing feats are accomplished with a minimum of creativity and no self-awareness. Also, while computers can mimic human communication, our exchanges are so riddled with microscopic nuance that machines could never adequately capture all of them. So while Tagg concedes that machines execute algorithms with far greater efficiency than their human counterparts, that fact alone doesn’t tell the whole story: “Machines cannot discover theorems using algorithms, yet mathematicians do it all the time.” The investigation covers the main players and theories in the field, including Alan Turing, Daniel Dennet, John Searle, Roger Penrose, and even René Descartes, among many others. The culmination of the study is a philosophical argument that human rationality is the basis for our free will, a capacity that ultimately distinguishes between human action and intellection from its artificial counterpart. Especially given the densely technical nature of the debates covered here, as well as the unavoidable employment of specialized terminology, Tagg does an admirable job keeping his prose clear and relatively uncluttered. Along the way, he includes helpful illustrations, as well as experiments and puzzles. What emerges is a challenging contention that computation is only one narrow component of human mental life, which also includes intuition and emotion. Also, Tagg articulates a kind of skeptical epistemology that outlines how one can reasonably hold a belief without becoming irrationally attached to it in the face of counterfactual evidence. An impressive effort full of depth and rigor.
An excellent choice for both the newcomer looking for an introduction to the debate over artificial intelligence and a more sophisticated reader looking for a deep reassessment.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-910464-03-8
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Hurst Farm Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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