A writer and programmer takes us under the hood of AI and inside the human mind to reveal the secrets of thinking. For readers of Steven Pinker and Daniel Kahneman.

WHAT IS THINKING?
AI and the Secrets of the Mind
by James Somers
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, publication date TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

When James Somers graduated high school in 2005, the mind was essentially a black box: forall the progress neuroscientists were making in understanding the brain, the mechanics of thinking itself remained elusive. Meanwhile, the computer scientists working on artificial intelligence were no further along in their own field. Deep Blue had used brute force to defeat Garry Kasparov in 1997, but evaluating hundreds of millions of positions per second had little in common with human thinking. To many of its practitioners, genuine AI seemed centuries away. In order to build a machine that could think, we had to first understand what thinking is – right?

Two decades later, we are in the midst of an intellectual revolution. The Turing test is in the rearview mirror, AI grows more powerful by the month, and we now have the beginnings of an operational understanding of how thinking works. How? Surprisingly, it is the building of AI models that is inspiring neuroscientists to probe the activity of individual artificial neurons. They are learning that the essential mechanics of intelligence are surprisingly simple–and they function in much the same way for both humans and AI. It seems that current AI models are doing much more than merely predicting the next word in a sentence, as their detractors suggest. James argues that they are in fact doing something a lot like thinking.

In WHAT IS THINKING? Somers explores a core set of ideas about how humans think that is so beautiful and clear, he believes they should be understood by every educated person, as we do the principles of natural selection, or the basic structure of DNA.

James Somers is a writer and programmer. He has contributed to The Atlantic and The New Yorker where, over the past decade, he has written stories about science and technology, on everything from the science of avalanches, to a legendary duo of Google programmers, to the vanishing art of coding in the age of AI. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.