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BooksTo date, I have written two books. Both are available for purchase either online or at your local bookstore. I'm not too sure about whether you can find them at the local library, yet. See below for individual descriptions.Free as in Freedom Free as in Freedom is a biography of free software pioneer Richard M. Stallman. For those who don't know him, Stallman is a legendary figure many times over within the computer software "hacking" community. Hard core developers know him primarily as the creator of emacs, the versatile text-editor that one of my reporting colleagues described as an "atomic-powered Swiss Army knife" for software programmers. The rest of the world knows him as the chief evangelist and articulator the free software concept. According to Stallman, all programmers and software users should have the freedom to borrow, use, copy, and modify existing software programs with only (very) limited exceptions. Essentially, the free software movement rejects the notion of software as private property, and in doing so, it has provided an intellectual foundation for the so-called "digital commons" phenomenon discussed at length by modern legal scholars such as Larry Lessig and Pamela Samuelson. Arguing A.I.: The Battle for 21st Century Science This is my first book. It came out a few weeks before Free as in Freedom and has been doing well in its own right. A reviewer on Amazon.com has offered the best summary of the book so far, calling it a "Cliff's Notes" guide to artificial intelligence and the controversy surrounding it. This project began as an e-book but morphed into a 100 page paperback. It's my attempt to explain the "Holy Grail" aspect of artificial intelligence--why does machine intelligence, however you want to define it, always seem to be 10 years away?-- coupled with a quick summary of the intellectual debates that gave birth to the artificial intelligence field. The book was published by Books@Random, a subsidiary of Random House. |