Showing results by author "Luke Dormehl" in All Categories

A fascinating guided tour of the complex, fast-moving, and influential world of algorithms - what they are, why they’re such powerful predictors of human behavior, and where they’re headed next. Algorithms exert an extraordinary level of influence on our everyday lives - from dating websites and financial trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches - Google's search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola.

When most of us think about artificial intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that artificial intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire. In some ways the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate.

The year 2016 marks the 60-year anniversary of the phrase 'artificial intelligence', and in this fascinating audiobook Luke Dormehl charts the weird and wonderful journey of one of mankind's greatest projects, the creation of Thinking Machines. This is a story of what it means to be human in the face of accelerating machine intelligence. It's about trying to make computers that are smarter than we are and what happens when it goes wrong. About what creativity means when all knowledge is data that can be stored on microchips.

What if everything in life could be reduced to a simple formula? What if numbers were able to tell us which partners we were best matched with – not just in terms of attractiveness, but for a long-term committed marriage? Or if they could say which films would be the biggest hits at the box office, and what changes could be made to those films to make them even more successful? Or even who out of us is likely to commit certain crimes, and when?