Thinking Machines

Today, the specter of artificial intelligence may rouse anxiety in the minds of the bookish sorts who pack the fair. But in his 1949 book “Giant Brains: Or, Machines That Think,” the American computer scientist Edmund Callis Berkeley struck a more upbeat note. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that they will take a load off men’s minds as great as the load that printing took off men’s writing: a great burden lifted.” A first edition of Berkeley’s book is among the dozens of items included in “A.I.: The Hidden History,” a collection of books, documents and artifacts offered by Christian White Rare Books ($125,000). The collection includes material from leading figures like the mathematician Claude Shannon (known as the father of information theory) and the philosopher David Lewis, as well as from (ahem) women who were active in the field.