(New York Review of Books) – The origin of the many so-called artificial intelligences now invading our work lives and swarming our personal devices can be found in an oddball experiment in 1950 by Claude Shannon. Shannon is known now as the creator of information theory, but then he was an obscure mathematician at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York’s West Village. Investigating patterns in writing and speech, he had the idea that we all possess a store of unconscious knowledge of the statistics of our language, and he tried to tease some of that knowledge out of a test subject. The subject conveniently at hand was his wife, Betty.

Reviewed:

The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna (Harper)

The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood by James Boyle (MIT Press)