The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines

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Summary: The human-machine relationship: history of an idea
Review: Are humans fundamentally different from machines? Can machines ever be human like? I read this book after watching the movie Artifical Intelligence starring Robin Williams as the automaton who become increasingly human. The movie reminded me that the ideas MIT history professor Bruce Mazlish discusses in this book will remain with us, if only in artistic imagination, even if you, like me, do not find his central thesis convincing. Roughly, Mazlish sees his ideas coming on the heels of three other breaks in intellectual dichotomies in histories - between the cosmos and the Earth through the Copernican revolution, between humans and the rest of the animal kindom, through the Darwinian revolution, and between the conscious and the sub-conscious through the Freudian revoltuion. Mazlish's contention is that there is no apparent limit to the expansion of intelligence of machines, to the point where he is willing to concede that computers will someday be endowed with emotions. Many might find these propositions outlandish. Even if you do, it should not detract you from the bulk of the book which is a good history of inventions and ideas, from Ancients Greeks and Chinese through the Renaissance and modern period, surrounding the capabilities of automatons or robots, and how these were also reflected in literature (for example, Frankenstein) and philosophy. This history of a set of ideas about the relationship between humans and the machines they create - but not necessarily the interpretation which Mazlish then gives them - is what this book should be valued for.