Contemplating Minds: A Forum for Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence)

The book review column in Artificial Intelligence has evolved from simple reviews to a forum where reviewers and authors debate in essays, even tutorial presentations, the latest, often competing, theories of human and artificial intelligence. Contemplating Minds brings together a selection of these reviews in a form suitable for the general scientific reader, seminar organizer, or student wanting a critical introduction that synthesizes and compares some of the most important and influential books and ideas to have emerged in AI over the past decade.Contemplating Minds is divided into four parts, each with a brief introduction, that address the major themes in artificial intelligence, human intelligence, and cognitive science research: Symbolic Models of Mind, Situated Action, Architectures of Interaction, and Memory and Consciousness.The books being debated include those by such influential authors as Allen Newell (Unified Theories of Cognition), Terry Winograd and F. Flores (Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design), Herbert Simon (The Sciences of the Artificial, second edition), Lucy Suchman (Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication), Marvin Minsky (The Society of Mind), Gerald Edelman (Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind), and Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained). The list of reviewers is equally distinguished.

The book review column in Artificial Intelligence has evolved from simple reviews into a forum where reviewers and authors debate the latest, often competing, theories of human and artificial intelligence. This volume brings together a selection of these reviews for general scientific readers, seminar organizers, or students who want a critical introduction that synthesizes and compares some of the most important and influential books and ideas to have emerged in AI over the past decade.
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Contemplating Minds brings together a selection of reviews from Artificial Intelligence in a form suitable for the general scientific reader, seminar organizer, or student wanting a critical introduction that synthesizes and compares some of the most important and influential books and ideas to have emerged in AI over the past decade.

Is the brain basically a computer? Is the mind a program for symbol processing? What is consciousness, and how could it work? Could we build an artificial mind in a robot, and would it be a good idea? Could an artificial mind have emotions? Is a mind made from smaller and smaller minds, until the pieces become so small that they are no longer mindlike? Questions like these arise for people curious about themselves, the nature of mind, and our thinking place in the universe. They are also at the core of research in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. However, the scholarly debate on these questions has resided in research papers, inaccessible to most people. One place where the scientific debate has been written for a broad audience is in the book review column of the international journal Artificial Intelligence, which has evolved from simple reviews to a multidisciplinary forum where reviewers and authors debate the latest, often competing, theories of human and artificial intelligence. Contemplating Minds brings together a selection of these reviews in a form suitable for the general scientific reader, seminar organizer, or student wanting a critical introduction that synthesizes and compares some of the most important and influential books and ideas to have emerged in AI over the past decade.

William J. Clancey is Chief Scientist of Human-Centered Computing in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center, and Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.Mark Stefik in an inventor and Research Fellow at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he directs the Information Sciences and Technologies Laboratory.