Machina Sapiens

Following on from "The Shortcut", Nello Cristianini has authored another brilliant book, explaining the ideas behind a technology destined to change the world. If the worst fear is that of the unknown, the cure is knowledge

Can machines think? This troubling question, posed by Alan Turing in 1950, has perhaps been answered: today we can converse with a computer without being able to distinguish it from a person.

Machines can pass university exams and program other computers. ChatGPT, Bard, and other 'language models' have proved proficient at performing tasks far beyond their creators' initial expectations, and we still do not know why. Trained simply to predict missing words in a text, such models have gained an understanding of the world and language that makes them capable of reasoning, planning, solving problems, as well as conversing almost flawlessly. Is this the secret of knowledge, and is it now in the hands of our creations? Perhaps we are no longer alone. And as we try to figure out how to share these powers with the 'aliens' who now work at our side, we can wonder what else they may learn tomorrow. Are we approaching a critical threshold beyond which machines will attain superhuman performance?

Following on from The Shortcut, Nello Cristianini has authored another brilliant book - written like a gripping thriller - explaining the ideas behind a technology destined to change the world. If our worst terror has always stemmed from fear of the unknown, the cure, since time immemorial, is knowledge.

Autorentext

Nello Cristianini is a professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bath and the author of "The Shortcut: Why Intelligent Machines Do Not Think Like Us" (CRC Press, 2023) and other books and articles dealing with artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and the social impact of AI.

Klappentext

Following on from "The Shortcut", Nello Cristianini has authored another brilliant book, explaining the ideas behind a technology destined to change the world. If the worst fear is that of the unknown, the cure is knowledge

Inhalt

Prologue
I .Scientists: building thinking machines

1. The alien among us
2. The imitation game
3. Domino effect
4. They called it GPT
5. Unexpected behaviour
   II. People: when man met the machine
6. First Contact
7. Global Turing Test
8. For Eliza
9. How to hypnotise a machine
10. The strange case of the algorithm with hallucinations
11. Taking liberties
12. The race
13. Fear
    III. Machines: what they know about us, what we know about them
14. A question from the past
15. Autopsy of an alien
16. The first sparks
17. Pandora's Box
18. Critical mass
    Epilogue
    Glossary
    Bibliography