Will computers be able to think? Five books to help us understand AI

From the limits of machine learning to a novel exploring human prejudices - Nick Harkaway shares his favourite books about artificial intelligence

The problem with AI is that while it's relatively easy to define the "A", the "I" remains elusive. We don't know what our own intelligence is, nor how we generate our familiar conscious experience, so it's tricky to know how we might create an artificial consciousness, or indeed recognise it if we did. Algorithms can knit together plausible conversation by sampling enormous numbers of exchanges between humans, but they have no greater understanding of those exchanges than would an enormous set of punch cards speaking through a bellows and a brass trumpet. The old Turing test now looks sadly inadequate. A machine-learning program might well counterfeit human speech and yet fail to recognise a snow leopard standing on green grass because the image contains no actual snow, and therefore the cat does not meet the definition.

That distinction between true AI and the powerful machine learning tools of Google and Amazon is tackled head-on by Hector Levesque in Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI. A professor emeritus in the computer science department at the University of Toronto, Levesque fearlessly zips us through John Searle's "Chinese room" argument and the problem of common sense before delving deeper to the complexities of the "Winograd Schema". Don't be alarmed: this book makes everything clear.