Book Reviews : Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea Publisher: The MIT Press,Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Cambridge,MA 02142 Year of Publication: 1985 Length: 287 pages Price: $14.95 Intended Audience: Cognitive and social scientists Usefulness: High Clarity: Exceptional Difficulty: Not easy

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea is a lucid and admirably objective consideration of what artificial intelligence can reasonably aspire to and how that relates to the capabilities of human minds as understood in psychology and philosophy. Despite the virtual absence of technical notation, important computational ideas and techniques are presented with remarkable fidelity. The author bids us to consider (though not necessarily to accept) not only the very idea that one might artifice intelligence, but also the startling related idea that our own intelligence is equivalent to an artifice, that "we are, at root, computers ourselves."