Machines Who Think

The first narrative history of artificial intelligence, written by someone who personally knew the founders — McCarthy, Minsky, Newell, Simon, Samuel. McCorduck traces the dream of intelligent machines from antiquity through the Dartmouth conference to the expert systems era, with first-hand interviews that capture the ambitions, rivalries, and blind spots of the field's creators. The revised 2004 edition extends the story through neural networks and the internet. As a historical document it is irreplaceable: no other account gives you the texture of what it felt like to be inventing AI in the 1950s and 1960s. For anyone trying to understand why AI's current moment echoes so many earlier ones, McCorduck provides the long view.