A fascinating look at Artificial Intelligence, from its humble Cold War beginnings to the dazzling future that is just around the corner. When most of us think about Artificial Intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that Artificial Intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire.  In some ways, the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate. In Thinking Machines , technology journalist Luke Dormehl takes you through the history of AI and how it makes up the foundations of the machines that think for us today. Furthermore, Dormehl speculates on the incredible--and possibly terrifying--future that's much closer than many would imagine. This remarkable book will invite you to marvel at what now seems commonplace and to dream about a future in which the scope of humanity may need to broaden itself to include intelligent machines. "Luke Dormehl is the rare lay person...who actually understands the science (and even the math) and is able to parse it in an edifying and exciting way...I recommend this book to anyone with a lay scientific background who wants to understand what I would argue is today’s most important revolution, where it came from, how it works and what is on the horizon." --Ray Kurzweil,  New York Times Book Review "Exciting." --TechCrunch "Dormehl lets critics have their say but makes a convincing, often disturbing, but always-entertaining case that that we're in for a wild ride." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)  LUKE DORMEHL is a technology journalist, filmmaker and author, who has written for Fast Company , Wired , Consumer Reports , Politico , The L.A. Times , and other publications. He is also the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems... And Create More . Whatever Happened to Good Old-Fashioned AI?   It was the first thing people saw as they drew close: a shining, stainless steel globe called the Unisphere, rising a full twelve stories into the air. Around it stood dozens of fountains, jetting streams of crystal-clear water into the skies of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, in New York’s Queens borough. At various times during the day, a performer wearing a rocket outfit developed by the US military jetted past the giant globe—showing off man’s ability to rise above any and all challenges.   The year was 1964 and the site, the New York World’s Fair. During the course of the World’s Fair, an estimated 52 million people descended upon Flushing Meadows’ 650 acres of pavilions and public spaces. It was a celebration of a bright present for the United States and a tantalizing glimpse of an even brighter future: one covered with multilane motorways, glittering skyscrapers, moving pavements and underwater communities. Even the possibility of holiday resorts in space didn’t seem out of reach for a country like the United States, which just five years later would successfully send man to the Moon. New York City’s “Master Builder” Robert Moses referred to the 1964 World’s Fair as “the Olympics of Progress.”   Wherever you looked there was some reminder of America’s post-war global dominance. The Ford Motor Company chose the World’s Fair to unveil its latest automobile, the Ford Mustang, which rapidly became one of history’s best-selling cars. New York’s Sinclair Oil Corporation exhibited “Dinoland,” an animatronic recreation of the Mesozoic age, in which Sinclair Oil’s brontosaurus corporate mascot towered over every other prehistoric beast. At the NASA pavilion, fairgoers had the chance to glimpse a fifty-one-foot replica of the Saturn V rocket ship boat-tail, soon to help the Apollo space missions reach the stars. At the Port Authority Building, people lined up to see architects’ models of the spectacular “Twin Towers” of the World Trade Center, which was set to break ground two years later in 1966.   Today, many of these advances evoke a nostalgic sense of technological progress. In all their “bigger, taller, heavier” grandeur, they speak to the final days of an age that was, unbeknownst to attendees of the fair, coming to a close. The Age of Industry was on its way out, to be superseded by the personal computer– driven Age of Information. For those children born in 1964 and after, digits would replace rivets in their engineering dreams. Apple’s Steve Jobs was only nine years old at the time of the New York World’s Fair. Google’s cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would not be born for close to another decade; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for another ten years after that.   As it turned out, the most forward-looking section of Flushing Meadows Corona Park turned out to be the exhibit belonging to International Business