Gary Marcus Books

Artificial intelligence did not begin with neural networks or with the mountains of data we now take for granted. In its infancy, the field was driven by a very different dream — one grounded in logic, symbols, and understanding. The early pioneers of AI, from Newell and Simon to Minsky and McCarthy...

From Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

Deep learning excels when the environment is constrained and the patterns are consistent. A convolutional neural network trained to recognize cats on Instagram images performs astonishingly well — until one day, the cat is drawn instead of photographed, or half-hidden by a shadow. The network then f...

From Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

The story of neuroscience is one of extraordinary persistence. When Santiago Ramón y Cajal peered through his microscope in the late nineteenth century, he could not have predicted the dazzling imaging tools that would appear a century later. Yet his hand-drawn depictions of neurons were the first g...

From The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists

Among all the mysteries of neuroscience, consciousness is perhaps the most profound. To speak as the editors often do, it is not the brain’s capacity to process information that astonishes us—it is the subjective experience, the felt quality of being. The contributors in this section grapple with fu...

From The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists