Thinking with Machines by Peter De Bolla

Thinking with Machines by Peter De Bolla

Sixty-five years ago a small group of maverick thinkers gathered in a converted Buddhist museum on the outskirts of Cambridge, convinced that language held the key to unlocking artificial intelligence. Their leader was the extraordinary and eccentric Margaret Masterman – linguist, logician, philosopher, religious devotee, and forgotten prophet of AI.

With the discovery of an archive that had remained unopened for nearly forty years, Peter de Bolla has pieced together the remarkable story of Masterman’s creation and direction of the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU). Working on the fringes of the university, dismissed as an amateur and constrained by structural sexism, Margaret Masterman and the CLRU worked at an extraordinary pace to crack the problem of machine translation. Taking Turing’s theoretical proposal of an ‘electronic brain’ and running furiously with it, they built the first machine that could think – a machine capable of engaging with human minds, and even, in Masterman’s prophesised future, of doing philosophy alongside them.

Her audacious claim that a machine could generate meaning, not merely manipulate symbols made – and still makes – her both a prophetic voice and a heretic. Blending biography, intellectual history, the drama of scientific revolution, and the exhilarating discovery of AI, this book reveals how Masterman and her collaborators – from philosophers, linguists and botanists to quantum theorists – came to formulate a theory of language and mind that we are only now beginning to see in action in the large language models shaping our world today.

Peter de Bolla is Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics at the University of Cambridge, UK. Between 2014–2018 he was Director of the Cambridge Concept Lab. He is the author of numerous academic works ranging from Wordsworth to American History, the sublime to human rights. He was a founding editor of Granta magazine and has written regularly for Granta, The LRB and other literary periodicals and magazines.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781350642980
ISBN 10	1350642983
Title	Thinking with Machines
Author	Peter De Bolla
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Year published	2026-11-12
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.