A deeply human story about AI, told through the thrilling biographies of genius women and men who designed, built and shaped it.
Artificial Intelligence is strongly entangled with the aspirations, fears, intuitions and obsessions of those who committed to it.
Only by following their steps a deep and contextualized comprehension of AI is possible.
This way we can see how scientific discoveries, utopist visions and worries about the future got all mixed up from the beginning.
This work is about pioneers like Ada Lovelace, enchantress of numbers, Top Secret Rosies and Grace Murray Hopper.
Other key figures are those people who defined AI as we know it, like Alan Turing and Hubert Dreyfus.
But also Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil and Rosalind Picard among others.
This book celebrates human intelligence and its relentless pursuit of overcoming the limits of knowledge.
Maurizio Caminito was head of Rome Central Children
Library from 1989 to 1996, then head of the Rome Libraries
Office from 2002 to 2008. He taught at the University of
Tuscia and at La Sapienza University of Rome. He published
Manuale del navigatore internet (Mondadori) and La biblioteca nella
nuvola (Editrice Bibliografica).
Pub date: May 2026
Length: pp. 368