lowest kindergartner in the school
chess club is smarter than AlphaGo.”
The boundary between Part IV,
Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Lan-
guage, and Part V, The Barrier of Mean-
ing, is arbitrary and superfluous, exactly
because, as Mitchell is well aware, with-
out meaning, language isn’t natural. But
her discussion of both subjects is knowl-
edgeable, informative, and strong, partic-
ularly on the subject of analogies, the
topic of her doctoral thesis (published as
Analogy Making As Perception: A Computer
Model).
Here, too, she’s justifiably skeptical:
“It seems to me extremely unlikely that
machines could ever reach the level of hu-
mans on translation, reading comprehen-
sion, and the like exclusively from online
data, with essentially no real understand-
ing of the language they process. Lan-
guage relies on commonsense knowledge
and understanding of the world.... Does
the lack of humanlike understanding...in-
evitably result in their being brittle, unre-
liable and vulnerable to attack? No one
knows the answer, and this fact should
give us all pause.”
In the penultimate chapter, Mitchell
reiterates the point she’s been making
throughout the book with a photograph
that, like the soldier coming home, is
beyond the comprehension of any AI
program (the humor of President Obama
adding pounds to the scale) (Figure 4)
The final chapter, “Questions, An-
swers, and Speculations,” is far less
speculative than Mitchell pretends:
“[T]he take-home message from this
book is that we humans tend to overes-
timate AI advances and underestimate
the complexity of our own intelligence.
Today’s AI is far from general intelli-
gence, and I don’t believe that machine‘superintelligence’ is anywhere on the
horizon.”
Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for
Thinking Humans is a highly readable
explanation of both AI’s recent impres-
sive successes and its longstanding
(and perhaps inherent) limitations, is-
sues, and failures. Most remarkably, un-
like skeptical outsiders like myself, its
author has been actively working in the
field for her entire professional life.volume 25 number 1 2020 W W W. S K E P T I C. C O M 5 9Figure 4: A photograph used as an example of understanding beyond the com-
prehension of an AI program: President Obama surreptitiously adds a few pounds
as a colleague weighs himself. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.“We have done what historians do: we
have told a particular story, not the whole
story...” (ix)
Were magical entertainers
persecuted as having real magic powers?
How does theatrical magic relate to the
history of science, technology, and psy-
chology? Peter Lamont has previously
written about the psychology of decep-
tion and paranormal history, while Jim
Steinmeyer has written about early 20th
century greats and is the leading expert
on the mechanics of 20th century large
stage illusion. They have combined their
talents in their scholarly and lucid new
book, The Secret History of Magic, which
ranges from ancient times to the 21st cen-tury. Its endnotes cite current scholarship
in multiple disciplines.
Their book is a thematic generalTarcherPerigee. 2018.
368 pages. $28.
ISBN-13: 978-0143130635It’s Magic
A Review of The Secret Histor y of Magic: The True Stor y
of the Deceptive Ar tby Peter Lamont and Jim SteinmeyerREVIEWED BY MICHELLE AINSWORTH