Stephen Downes

This is a pre-release version of Nik Bear Brown's Intelligence?, an engaging and fascinating exploration of the concept behind not only AI but life in general. It rewards a good reading. "It is the book's thesis: that intelligence is not a single thing being accumulated across the tree of life, but a family of distinct capacities, each with its own evolutionary history, each extendable by different tools, and none of them well described by any definition we currently have." Or put another way, "Every cognitive tool humans have built - from the first written word to the GPS to the bomb-sniffing dog - extended a specific capacity while requiring human judgment to direct it. The microscope extended pattern recognition. Writing extended memory. GPS extended spatial navigation. AI extends pattern recognition, prediction, and associative memory to superhuman scale." Definitely take the time to have a look, and even better, interact with the author on the concepts and themes. It came up in the course of a conversation on Google Groups.