I just finished reading the above book.  It stands out in my recent readings in the area of artificial intelligence as being more skeptical of progress in AI.  She points out that while there has been undoubted progress in the past 60 years, there remains a gulf between what humans are good at and what machines are good at.  The ability to cross domains remains elusive for machines. She points out that much of what we think of as limitations in the biological architecture may in fact be the key to our abilities.  The fact that we might not be able to remember high school calculus does not prevent us from catching a ball.  

I was delighted to read her description of both the internal theater of human consciousness as the location where we experiment with possible futures, and how the “Monte Carlo Tree” might be the approximation of that in computing terms.  I find myself as both a player on the stage of that internal theater as well as the audience and critique.  She notes this internal dialog as being something that has only just started in the computer world. 

I was fascinated and think I agree that what we recognize as human intellect is innately tied to being in a body, subject to its dangers, with a heritage in our own cognitive architecture that goes back to the primordial soup, and emerged into a social one.  I agree with her that our understanding of our own thinking process is at its very beginning.  

There is a wonderful quote at the end of the book from Pedro Domingos about computers getting too smart, “...the real problem is that they are too stupid and they’ve already overtaken the world”.   I think I subscribe to this view.  Not that they are stupid.  They are what they are, but they are not us, and they already drive a great deal of decision making.