William D. May’s Edges of Reality (Plenum, £23.15/$28.95, ISBN 0
306 45272 3) could be described as a survey of the capabilities of the human
brain versus those of computers. Sounds boring—but turns out to be
intriguing from the first sentence and absorbing from the second. How, for
example, do we know there is “a thought we can never think”? After delving into
the past and far into the future, May’s reassuring conclusion is that computers
are not going to take over from humans.
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