Artificial Minds

This book brings some refreshing new ideas and perspectives to the field of artificial intelligence. Although qualitative in his approach, and written for a "general audience", the author offers many insights into a field whose view of intelligence has been interpreted solely in terms of human capabilities. The author offers several alternatives for defining and measuring machine intelligence, all of them interesting, but needing more integration into practical applications in order to test their efficacy. His ideas though serve as strong perturbations that lift the field out of the local equilibrium it frequently finds itself in. He does occasionally wade into the muddy waters of speculative philosophy in the guise of the "mind-body problem", but the time spent in doing this is more than made up for by his efforts to define and give advice on how to build an artificial mind. The author is fully aware of the roller-coast ride of confidence and false optimism that the field of machine intelligence has taken in the last five decades. He describes the "brittleness" of AI systems that are usually confined to a specific domain, such as chess or natural language processing, but cannot be used with drastic modification in other domains. It is the opinion of this reviewer that such domain-specific systems are intelligent, but should be classified as a form of "low-level intelligence". Systems that can cross learn across domains have a higher level of intelligence. The author could easily incorporate such a classification since his view of the mind is that it is "continuous" rather than a "Boolean" notion. He wants the reader to consider the proposition that there are "degrees of mind" rather than a discrete, discontinuous jump from not having a mind to having one. Mind can be implemented in machines he says, how much depends on several factors, with the most question to answer is how it can be done, not that it can be done. Readers who do not want to engage in philosophical speculation may be tempted to skip the reading of chapter 2, which discusses the "mind-body problem". However, there are many interesting discussions in this chapter, and in omitting its perusal such a reader would miss in particular the highly insightful overview of the ideas of Aaron Sloman on free will. Sloman has some interesting things to say about free will, and his ideas are pertinent in an engineering setting, as the reader will discover when reading the author's summarization. The notion of free will as a "Boolean" is dismissed by Sloman, and the author shows how Sloman's view of free will is directly applicable to the design of (intelligent) agents. The view of Sloman, who is a philosopher, is a good example of the trend of many philosophers to move into the field of artificial intelligence. There are many examples of this trend, and this century will no doubt see the rise of many more of what may be called "industrial philosophers." One of the more refreshing ideas in the

I was originally searching for a book to fuel my thirst for Visual Basic computer-programming, thinking that this book would give clues to how an artificial mind could be implemented by someone like me. And on that basis I should have given this book 3 stars, but I have realised that the sphere of AI is monumentally vast!When I first began to read, I thought it was quite hard going, but I became accustomed to the author's formal but chatty narrative. I found the chapter about Animal Intelligence riveting and truly eye-opening.If you have even a passing interest in either psychology or ambitious computer programming, then you cannot live without this book. To everyone else: you cannot live without this book!In a word: Inspirational

This is the best survey of AI I've seen. However, I think that it really should have more information on very innovative projects such as copycat. Towards this, I can only recommend Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Melanie Mitchell's Analogy-making as perception, and Robert French's Subtlety of Sameness.

As a former student of Dr. Franklin, I am probably somewhat biased. I feel, however, that I can still provide an objective overview of this well written book.The goal of Dr. Franklin's book is to put forth his concept of a general mechanism of mind. As an early proponent of autonomous agents, his writing leans heavily in this direction. His new paradigm of mind, described in the final chapter, can be seen to view the mind as a multitude of disparate mechanisms operating on sensations to create information and re-creating prior information with the primary purpose of selecting the next action, within its limits, for an agent to take.In building toward his new paradigm, Dr. Franklin makes stops on an admittedly biased tour to briefly explain other concepts for mechanisms of mind. Patti Maes, Marvin Minsky, Rodney Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, and Robert Ornstein are just a few of the pioneers in this field whose works are touched on. The bibliography serves as a must-read list for anyone interested in expanding their horizons on this new frontier.Along the way, Dr. Franklin also sheds light on three debates central to Artificial Intelligence. They are 1) Can machines truly have minds, 2) Which approach, symbolism or connectionism, will yield a workable mechanism of mind, and 3) What role should representations play in intelligence? While presenting both sides of each argument, it is fairly clear which camp Dr. Franklin is in.While written for the lay reader, Dr. Franklin's highly accessible writing should provide much food for thought for those practicing in AI as well. I highly recommend this book.

This is the perfect introduction for the lay reader who has more than a passing interest in AI. The author is able to explain issues in reasonable depth while keeping his explanations accessible. Some readers might find the author's digressions stray too far from the point at hand, but this reader doesn't fault the author, since the digressions are always fascinating. Comments, footnotes and biblio combine to give you a clear idea of what you'll want to read next.