How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? According Ray Kurzweil we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Read more...

Introducing basic ideas in artificial intelligence from the perspective of building intelligent agents, this revised and updated textbook includes historical notes at the end of every chapter, exercises, margin notes and a full bibliography. Read more...

A plain English step by step guide with detailed instructions about installing, customizing, and using Web Bots, Artificial Intelligence, Speech Synthesis, and Voice Recognition for website interactivity. Presenting the tools to create Chatterbots with all the bells and whistles - in particular the field of Voice Recognition. Read more...

A self-explanatory title. This book is targeted at Java programmers who are familar with object-oriented design concepts and are intested in making their programs behave more intelligently. Read more...

In his challenging book, Dyson surrounds contemporary topics related to emerging information networks with historical context, illustrating an evolutionary dance between intelligence, nature, and machines. Read more...

A new book from Marvin Minsky, probing deeper into the question of natural intelligence. Do not look for simple explanations: he believes "we need to find more complicated ways to explain our most familiar mental events", rejecting the idea of consciousness as a unitary "Self" in favor of "a decentralized cloud" of more than 20 distinct mental processes. Read more...

Some love it, some hate it, but The Emperor's New Mind, physicist Roger Penrose's 1989 treatise attacking the foundations of strong artificial intelligence, is crucial for anyone interested in the history of thinking about AI and consciousness. Read more...

Making his key writings are made available to a broad, non-specialist readership for the first time. The collection includes Turing's declassified wartime 'Treatise on the Enigma'; letters from Turing to Churchill and to codebreakers; lectures, papers, and broadcasts which opened up the concept of AI and its implications; and the paper which formed the genesis of the investigation of Artificial Life. Read more...

Following all aspects of the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied conversational agents as well as details of specific working systems. Many of the chapters are written by multidisciplinary teams of psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, artists, and researchers in interface design. Read more...

Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Gödel, Escher, Bach is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, it also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence for mimicking human thought. Read more...

Exploring the relation between the computer revolution and our changing ideas of what it means to be a human being. Her pet theme: how information became an entity in itself, divorced from the material that carries it in both science and literature. Read more...

Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, unites two fields of study that have been moving uneasily toward one another for at least two decades: computers and brains. Most people think that maybe someday, computers will be as smart as we humans are. But Hawkins explains why the way we build computers today won't take us down that path. Read more...

This book offer offers a complete toolkit for the Java programmer who wants to build bots, spiders, and aggregrators. The CD-ROM includes all the source code for the author's intelligent agent platform, which readers can use to build their own spiders, bots, and aggregators. Read more...

Presents a formal approach to dealing with agents and agent systems providing a good introduction to agents, while also drilling down to some fascinating and deep issues in multi-agent systems. Read more...

Complete with software and step-by-step instructions. You can learn how to create your own authentic and engaging personalities, apply the technology to business and individual projects, add synthetic voices and realistic faces to virtual humans to use psychology and humor in character design. Read more...

A computer in your shoe? Maybe so. Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Media Lab, joins the ranks of techno-prognosticators with When Things Start to Think. His focus is on how the future of computing will fit into our physical realities. Read more...