The Descent of Artificial Intelligence: A Deep History of an Idea 400 Years in the Making, reviewed by Sandra Braman

The word "descent" is in the title of Kevin Padraic Donnelly's book on the history of artificial intelligence (AI) because, the author argues, the "achievement" of AI intelligence has been the result of hundreds of years of the development of social sciences that significantly reduced our understanding of what it is to be human.Donnelly's deep mining of the wide range of nuances in diverse views of what is meant by "intelligence" at all surrounds the reader with shifting prisms as to where the boundaries of the human lie and possible relationships between what we call the human and sources of knowledge and information that we refer to as intelligence.The Oxford English Dictionary confirms what Donnelly is telling us.After the word "intelligence" first appeared in print in the English language in 1390 in a poem by John Gower, the history of its use, too, reflects a sense of it coming nearer to being understood as the essence of being human, and then wandering away from that sense.According to this book, the historical debate was intense and raucous.The Descent of Artificial Intelligence is several books in one, fractally replicating in structure the relations between the concept of "intelligence" and that of the human that are its subject matter.Some of these are explicitly claimed by the book's author; others appear in the course of reading.