The Intelligence Engine

In 1950 a British mathematician asked a simple, dangerous question: can machines think? Three-quarters of a century later, machines write, draw, converse, and reason — and the world is scrambling to understand what it has built. The Intelligence Engine tells the whole story of artificial intelligence, from a wartime code-breaker's thought experiment to the generative systems now in a billion hands.

E.B Cohen traces the full arc: the ancient dream of automata and the birth of the field at Dartmouth in 1956; the long swing between symbolic logic and neural networks; the booms, the commercial gold rushes, and the two bleak "AI winters" when the money and the faith ran out; the quiet gathering of the ingredients — big data, the internet, and the accidental power of the graphics chip; and the 2012 breakthrough, AlexNet, that lit the deep-learning revolution.

From there the pace only quickens: the Transformer and the scaling hypothesis; AlphaGo's defeat of a Go champion and AlphaFold's solution to a fifty-year biology problem; the image explosion of diffusion models; and ChatGPT, the moment AI met the world. The book closes with the reckoning now under way — bias and misinformation, the alignment problem and AI safety, the politics of compute, and the open, unresolved question of whether machines are on the road to general intelligence.

Sober, vivid, and grounded in the landmark papers and the people who wrote them — Turing and Rosenblatt, Minsky and Hinton, and the researchers behind the models that now shape daily life — this is a single, authoritative, readable history of the quest to build a thinking machine, and of the revolution that finally, imperfectly, began to succeed.