What Makes You Clever

The Puzzle of Intelligence

From Black Holes and Big Bangs to the Higgs boson and the infinitesimal building blocks of all matter, modern science has been spectacularly successful, with one glaring exception — intelligence. Intelligence still remains as one of the greatest mysteries in science.

How do you chat so effortlessly? How do you remember, and why do you forget? From a basis of ten maxims What Makes You Clever explains the difficulties as well as the persuasive and persistent over-estimations of progress in Artificial Intelligence.

Computers have transformed our lives, and will continue to do so for many years to come. But ever since the Turing Test proposed in 1950 up to IBM's Deep Blue computer that won the second six-game match against world champion Garry Kasparov, the science of artificial intelligence has struggled to make progress.

The reader's expertise is engaged to probe human language, machine learning, neural computing, holistic systems and emergent phenomenon. What Makes You Clever reveals the difficulties that scientists grapple with in their efforts to understand your cleverness, and points to possible ways forward.

Contents:

• A Singular Enigma
• Scanning for Gold
• Brain Wave Solutions
• Whole Parts of Minds
• Meaningful Principles — The Search Continues
• Holism — an Unholy Problem
• Hoping for a Knee up Soon
• Self-organising Systems — The Engineer's Nightmare
• The Knowledge Web
• Learning Machines — Climbing Lost and Blind
• Hot Technologies — the Doomed and the Dubious
• Mind Recursion
• Ultra-Intelligence
• Semantic Mirages
• Hopeware Science
• The Glass Half Full

Readership: General public.
Key Features:

• No other book combines computer science and cognitive science (and a little neuroscience) to explain in non-specialist terminology, why intelligence has resisted scientific understanding
• All readers can participate in many of the arguments
• The explanations are based on ten maxims — some psychological, some technical, and some logical