Mad scientists Book

This anthology, copyright 1983, contains stories that still stand up. That's because (1) they were written by top-notch authors who thought deeply about our future with intelligent machines, and because (2) we haven't actually made intelligent machines yet, so there's been no chance for the stories to become obsolete. Well, some of the earlier stories refer to vacuum tubes, but other than that...

My favorite stories were "The Lost Machine" by John Wyndham, "Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison, "The Monkey Wrench" by Gordon R. Dickson, and "The Bicentennial Man" by Isaac Asimov.

Everyone younger than 40, and certainly 30, had better start thinking about what life could be like once someone develops thinking robots, because it could happen while you folks are alive. This book contains so much food for thought, such a spectrum of speculative ideas, that it is still useful over 30 years later, in thinking about the possibilities of machines that think.