As stated in the preface, “This book is for [people] who don’t know much about computers and want to know what they can do for you--or to you. It tells the story of how we became slaves to our silicon dependents, and how they may one day become slaves to us” (p. x). It is a history of computing with a stimulating historical perspective. It is erudite as well as esoteric. For example, the author compares trying to comprehend programming with how one might learn the directions for crocheting--an interesting comparison, but quite simplistic, as he soon points out.

Chapters include “A Strange New Machine,” “The Greed for Speed,” “Precisely Speaking,” “The Subjunctive Mood,” “Limits to Growth,” and “Thinking about Thinking.” Each of these chapters addresses a deceptively simple question, such as How do we program computers? What can’t they do? and Could they think? Rawlins answers the central question in each chapter and brings readers up to date with a presentation of the current state of research on the topic and his ideas about what we might expect in the future.

Various insights make the book fun to read as well as provocative and informative. For example, in his discussion of the usefulness of logic, Rawlins says, “We’re survival machines, not logic machines. That’s the essential problem for artificial intelligence. We can watch birds to see how they fly, and we can model fish to see how they swim, but what works well for flying, fighting, farming and so on fails for thinking. Because we have no ideas what we do when we think, we can’t simply create a computer program that does the same thing” (p. 113).

While he does present a vivid picture of the current situation and some of the key historical events that got us here, Rawlins paints a depressing view of the future. “Some machines will, eventually, become smarter than we are in some ways. Even then they’ll be alien to us, more alien perhaps than life forms of another planet. If so, we’ll never truly understand them. Eventually we won’t truly control them, either; every month they may grow a hundred times more complex than they were the month before. The consequences are, literally, unimaginable” (p. 126). While this could certainly come to pass (and in some ways it has), the future appears very bleak if we allow this to happen. Therein lies the power of this book.