A familiar trope of cognitive science, linguistics, and the philosophy of psychology over the past forty or so years has been the idea of the mind as a modular system-that is, one consisting of functionally specialized subsystems responsible for processing different classes of input, or handling specific cognitive tasks like vision, language, logic, music, and so on. However, one of the major achievements of neuroscience has been the discovery that the brain has incredible powers of renewal and reorganization. This "neuroplasticity," in its various forms, has challenged many of the orthodox conceptions of the mind which originally led cognitive scientists to postulate hardwired mental modules. This book examines how such discoveries have changed the way we think about the structure of the mind. It contends that the mind is more supple than prevailing theories in cognitive science and artificial intelligence acknowledge. The book uses language as a test case. The claim that language is cognitively special has often been understood as the claim that it is underpinned by dedicated-and innate-cognitive mechanisms. Zerilli offers a fresh take on how our linguistic abilities could be domain-general: enabled by a composite of very small and redundant cognitive subsystems, few if any of which are likely to be specialized for language. In arguing for this position, however, the book takes seriously various cases suggesting that language dissociates from other cognitive faculties. Accessibly written, The Adaptable Mind is a fascinating account of neuroplasticity, neural reuse, the modularity of mind, the evolution of language, and faculty psychology.

A concise but informative overview of AI ethics and policy. Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. Is it the game-changer it's been cracked up to be? If so, how is it changing the game? How is it likely to affect us as customers, tenants, aspiring home-owners, students, educators, patients, clients, prison inmates, members of ethnic and sexual minorities, voters in liberal democracies? This book offers a concise overview of moral, political, legal and economic implications of AI. It covers the basics of AI's latest permutation, machine learning, and considers issues including transparency, bias, liability, privacy, and regulation.

The book explores the role of leisure in modern life. It was written in the belief that leisure sets us apart as a species, that what is useless by commercial standards is probably the best thing we have going for us, and that leisure is under attack, in high danger of being lost, and has been for some time (since at least the end of the Second World War). The source of the problem is the ascendancy of the economic imperative, the subordination of the science of means (philosophy) by the science of ends (economics). The book argues that our leisurely impulse has been so squandered that boredom is now a significant problem in modern life. The essays canvass the distinctive contributions of art, science and religion, and provide a synthetic account of these three forces driving human culture.Although the book covers the science/religion question, this book differs from others on the science/religion debate in that it connects the traditional discussion to questions of economics and social policy. It takes an innovative approach in weaving the fundamentals of human life (art, science, economics and so on) into one fabric, namely, leisure.