The book asks a simple and yet a highly problematic question: if we abandon our anthropocentric attitude to intelligence and instead define our universe of possible possessors of intelligence as comprising all machines, animals, humans and computers of all sorts, then what is the best way to define and measure the intelligence that each possesses? This raises a host of obvious questions, such as at a simple level whether it is satisfactory to set computers IQ tests. The author is optimistic about the challenge, suggesting that there is growing support for the notion of using theories of information and computation to evaluate intelligence and behaviour whatever the platform that generates them. More broadly, the book discusses the increasingly pertinent question, what then really will be the difference between us (the humans) and them (the AIs) – maybe less than we would like to believe?
The measure of all minds by Jose Hernandez-Orallo 2017
