A friend mentioned John L. Casti's The Cambridge Quintet: A Work of Scientific Speculation (Perseus Books, 1998) to me recently because Alan Turing plays a major role in this fictional dialogue concerning machine intelligence. The premise is this: In 1949, C.P. Snow wants to advise the British government on the possibilities and potentials of machine intelligence, so he hosts a dinner party at his home in Cambridge with four guests to discuss the issues: Turing, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, and physicist Edwin Schrödinger. Over seven chapters corresponding to the courses of the dinner (sherry, soup, fish, meat, salad, dessert, and cigars and brandy), Casti narrates this imagined conversation. The result is an entertaining introduction to some of the philosophical concepts associated with artificial intelligence and human consciousness. The philosophical dialogue is a time-honored genre, although traditionally it's populated by character types (such as in Read More...