# Literature/1979/McCorduck

Authors :
* A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z &

## Author
### Website

   Q: What so-called smart computers do -- is that really thinking?
   A: No, if you insist that thinking can only take place inside the human cranium. But yes, if you believe that making difficult judgments, the kind usually left to experts, choosing among plausible alternatives, and acting on those choices, is thinking. That's what artificial intelligences do right now. Along with most people in AI, I consider what artificial intelligences do as a form of thinking, though I agree that these programs don't think just like human beings do, for the most part. I'm not sure that's even desirable. Why would we want AIs if all we want is human-level intelligence? There are plenty of humans on the planet. The field's big project is to make intelligences that exceed our own. As these programs come into our lives in more ways, we'll need programs that can explain their reasoning to us before we accept their decisions.
   — From http://www.pamelamc.com/html/machines_who_think.html

## Chronology

* Gillies, James & Robert Cailliau (2000). How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Buckland, Michael (1992). "Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush's Memex." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 43, no. 4 (May 1992), pp. 284-294. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1987/Conklin $^{[^]}$
* Smith, Linda Cheryl (1980). "'Memex' as an image of potentiality in information retrieval research and development." Proceedings of the 3rd annual ACM conference on research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR '80, Cambridge, England, 1980) Kent, UK: Butterworth, 1981. pp. 345-369. $^{[^]}$
* McCorduck, Pamela (1979). Machines Who Think. 25th anniversary edition, Natick, MA: A K Peters, Ltd., 2004. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1979/Smith $^{[^]}$
* Nelson, Ted (1974). Computer Lib/Dream Machines. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1958/Fairthorne $^{[^]}$
* McCarthy, John; Marvin Minsky; Nathan Rochester & Claude Shannon (1955). A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. $^{[^]}$
* Shannon, Claude E. & Warren Weaver (1949). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press. $^{[^]}$
* Shaw, Ralph R. (1949). "Machines and the Bibliographical Problems of the Twentieth Century." (pp. 37-71) In: L. N. Ridenour, et al. Bibliography in an Age of Science. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $^{[^]}$
* Wiener, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd ed., The MIT Press, 1965. $^{[^]}$
* Bush, Vannevar (1945). "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly (July 1945): 101-108. $^{[^]}$

## Reviews

* "In summary, if you are interested in the story of how the pioneers of AI approached the problem of getting a machine to think like a human, a story told with verve, wit, intelligence and perception, there is no better place to go than this book."
    --Nature, February 19, 2004
* "The enormous, if stealthy, influence of AI bears out many of the wonders foretold 25 years ago in Machines Who Think, Pamela McCorduck's groundbreaking survey of the history and prospects of the field…. [T]aken together, the original and the afterword form a rich and fascinating history."
    --Scientific American, May 2004