The Philosophy of Artificial Life Ed by Margaret Boden

This collection of essays is an excellent, if now increasingly dated, introduction to the ideas and concepts at the heart of Artificial Life. ALife is different from AI in that it is concerned with the idea of embodied action, agency and intelligence. In that sense AI is but a subset of ALife - although it'd be hard to find a thinker in AI who accepted the implications of this. For example Ray Kurzweil (and yes he's at the more bonkers end of the spectrum) would reject the core ideas of ALife out of hand.

What are these ideas? That intelligence and agency are necessarily embodied and that they don't need to reference Descartes Mind/Body dualism in any way for their foundations.

Now don't get me wrong, the field is still in its infancy, just like AI, but it's full of more interesting debates (I think) than AI. The idea of emergence, embodiment and, dare I use my own approach - axiomatic frameworks (although I should acknowledge Tarski, Levy, Kripke, Russell et al.).

I loved these essays for a couple of reasons - it was wonderfully encouraging to find a field of study that was taking ideas I find fascinating seriously and putting them to work.

I think about half of the essays are worth reading - some of them are now dated by technical advances, others pose ideas and questions that more powerful processing have answered - so in many ways it is the theoretical and speculative papers that are the most interesting.

A good little collection and worth reading if you're interested in this sort of thing.