Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding, modeling, and creating intelligence of various forms. It is a critical branch of cognitive science, and its influence is increasingly being felt in other areas, including the humanities. AI applications are transforming the way we interact with each other and with our environment, and work in artificially modeling intelligence is offering new insights into the human mind and revealing new forms mentality can take. This volume of original essays presents the state of the art in AI, surveying the foundations of the discipline, major theories of mental architecture, the principal areas of research, and extensions of AI such as artificial life. With a focus on theory rather than technical and applied issues, the volume will be valuable not only to people working in AI, but also to those in other disciplines wanting an authoritative and up-to-date introduction to the field.

Table of Contents

Part I Foundations

1 History, motivations, and core themes

2 Philosophical foundations

3 Philosophical challenges

Part II Architectures

4 GOFAI

5 Connectionism and neural networks

6 Dynamical systems and embedded cognition

Part III Dimensions

7 Learning

8 Perception and computer vision

9 Reasoning and decision making

10 Language and communication

11 Actions and agents

12 Artificial emotions and machine consciousness

Part IV Extensions

13 Robotics

14 Artificial life

15 The ethics of artificial intelligence

About the Authors

Keith Frankish is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Open University and Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Program in Neurosciences at the University of Crete. He is the author of Mind and Supermind (Cambridge, 2004) and Consciousness (2005). He is co-editor of In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond (with Jonathan St B. T. Evans, 2009), New Waves in Philosophy of Action (with Jesús H. Aguilar and Andrei A. Buckareff, 2010) and The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science (with William Ramsey, Cambridge, 2012).

William M. Ramsey is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of Representation Reconsidered (Cambridge, 2007) and co-editor of Philosophy and Connectionist Theory (with David Rumelhart and Stephen Stich, 1991), Rethinking Intuition (with Michael DePaul, 1998) and The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science (with Keith Frankish, Cambridge, 2012).