I’d like to give a shout-out to colleagues at the Babbage Institute which has Berkeley’s papers (and many books!).

 

Debbie Douglas

 

 

Deborah G. Douglas, PhD • Director of Collections and Curator of Science and Technology, MIT Museum; Research Associate, Program in Science, Technology, and Society • Room E28-320B • 314 Main Street • Gambrill Center • Cambridge, MA 02142 • ddouglas@mit.edu • 617-253-1766 telephone • 617-253-8994 facsimile • http://mitmuseum.mit.edu • she/her/hers

 

 

 

 

From: Members <members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> on behalf of Jonathan Coopersmith via Members <members@lists.sigcis.org>
Date: Friday, April 28, 2023 at 10:20 AM
To: SIGCIS <members@sigcis.org>
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] (no subject)

At this weekend's NYC antiquarian book show:

 

Thinking Machines

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)

 

"A Chief Skunk Looks Back," (interview with Sherm Mullin) Aerospace America March 2023 

 

 

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

 

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