I think I'll wait for the book to come out in paperback, cause I'm not sure the $30 would be well spent. My skeptical shields raised automatically when I read in the blurb "The emergence of artificial intelligence in mid-twentieth century". Uh, what? AFAIK, the only place AI has "emerged" so far is in science fiction.

Personally, I think "hard AI" is dead. That is, the notion that it's possible to design an intelligence, then throw the switch and have it "wake up", seems hopelessly antiquated and Newtonian. The best bet for seeing AI is to just wait for it to happen. Consciousness is the quintessential emergent phenomenon, not predictable from the physical structures of the brain, and I expect that it'll happen naturally (and I use the word deliberately) from the fertile ground we're creating by building a huge pile of processing capacity interconnected into a huge network. Wait for it, AI will be along eventually...though it may be hard to recognize at first.

Some of my certainty might seem like faith, because it's based on what I do as a programmer, at a level of abstraction that I've never been able to satisfactorily explain to a civilian. I suspect that perhaps cosmologists are some of the few non-programmers equipped to grasp what goes on in our "cyberspace", based as it is on symbolic representations--formulae or source code--that describe but don't represent our respective universes. Programmers and cosmologists and physicists map symbols through a strange interior mental space and we see something that I can't put into words for other people. I just have to ask you to take it on faith when I say that I've "seen" or "experienced" things out in cyberspace that are the precursors to artifical life and intelligence. They're faint simple traces so far, but in time they'll grow and emerge into everybody's awareness. So trust me, AI is on the way.