computing and Artificial intelligence

Containing more than 300 documents, the Analog Computing portion of the collection begins with Dennis Henrion’s 1618 description of Galileo’s “Proportional Compass” and continues through documents describing the differential analyzers and other analog computing devices developed in the late 1940s.

Consisting of more than 400 documents, Digital Computing primarily contains papers by computer pioneers describing early digital computers. It also chronicles an array of enabling technologies and important communications documents. Digital Computing begins with the 1720 Paris edition of the Histoire et Mémoires containing Leibniz’ introduction of binary arithmetic, and focuses on documents describing the most important first- and second-generation digital developments in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as important later developments through the early 2000s.  The collection also includes original copies of several important digital computing patents.

This collection includes over 250 works, beginning with foundational theories proposed in the 15th and 16th centuries by Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan, Leonhard Euler in Enodatio Quaestionis, and Julien Offray de La Mettrie in L’Homme Machine.

Following these theoretical beginnings, The AI collection continues with many additional 20th century documents by AI pioneers. A few of the earlier ones include Jacques Herbrand’s 1931 dissertation on theorem proving, Nicolas Rashevsk’s 1938 book Mathematical Biophysics, the 1948 paper “Telelogical Mechanisms" by Norbert Wiener et al., Ross Ashby’s 1949 “The Brain as a Computing Machine,” W. Grey Walter’s article ”A Machine that Learns,” Norbert Wiener’s 1951 book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and Allen Newell and H. A. Simon’s 1956 “The Logic Theory Machine,” often called “the first AI program”.

The list goes on to include additional scientific documents by Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, K.J. W. Craik, George Miller, John McCarthy and John H. Holland to mentionn just a few.

One document worth highlighting is the unobtainable “A Proposal for the 1955 Dartmouth Summer Workshop” written by John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathan Rochester and Claude E. Shannon, that coined the term "Artificial Intelligence." This collection contains one of the few existing photocopies of this proposal.

In addition to the above publications relating to the theory and development of AI, this collection also contains scientific and fictional works warning about the dangers of AI, including its effects on economics and religion, and most prominently the idea of a “Technological Singularity” in which AI becomes fully autonomous, replicates itself, and takes over the management of warfare and world government. The scientific documents warning about these dangers includes works by Alan Turing, Stanislaw Ulum, Irving John Good, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener.

Fictional documents include works by well-known authors such as Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke, Verner Vinge, Jonathan Swift, Ambrose Bierce, Stanislaw Ulum, Olof Johannesson, and Greg Bear.

This collection also contains approximately 60 documents that do not perfectly fall into one of the above categories. These include the collected papers of prominent scientists and documents that depict the histories and theories of computing.