To produce thinking machines – or even just machines that we think are thinking – we first need to understand exactly how we think.
As a big fan of Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, I was highly motivated to read Common sense, the Turing test, and the quest for real AI, if only to find out just how soon a civilisation that has spaceships with personalities would become possible. I was surprised to find that only the last chapter of this very accessible introductory text is devoted to actual artificial intelligence (AI) technology.