Machina Sapiens: How Intelligent Machines Passed the Turing Test [Paperback]

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

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.

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 humans met the machine

6. The 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 77

13. Fear 83

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. Pandoras box

18. Critical mass

Epilogue

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 expectatiolãr