I have a copy in my archives that I have read several times. It was influential in my erly career in getting me to think about Symbolic AI.

Steve Kaisler
On 04/28/2023 10:19 AM Jonathan Coopersmith via Members <members@lists.sigcis.org> wrote:


At this weekend's NYC antiquarian book show:


Image
A book with a yellow, slightly tattered dust jacket, with the title “Giant Brains or Machines That Think,” by Edmund C. Berkeley, and a black circle containing an image of a human face with a yellow wire connecting the forehead to a box.
A first edition of the 1949 book “Giant Brains: Or, Machines That Think” is on offer as part of a collection of books, documents and artifacts called “A.I.: The Hidden History.”Credit...via Christian White Rare Books

A book with a yellow, slightly tattered dust jacket, with the title “Giant Brains or Machines That Think,” by Edmund C. Berkeley, and a black circle containing an image of a human face with a yellow wire connecting the forehead to a box.

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.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/arts/new-york-antiquarian-book-fair.html

Stay sane, 

Jonathan

Jonathan Coopersmith
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science

Professor (retired)
Department of History
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX  77843-4236
979.739.4708 (cell)


Preserving space archives:  https://www.toboldlypreserve.space/

FAXED.  The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine (Johns Hopkins University Press) 




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