Thinking with Machines

Margaret Masterman and the Discovery of AI

Peter de Bolla (Author)

Thinking with Machines

Margaret Masterman and the Discovery of AI

Peter de Bolla (Author)

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Sixty-five years ago a small group of maverick thinkers gathered in a converted Buddhist museum on the outskirts of Cambridge, convinced that language held the key to unlocking artificial intelligence. Their leader was the extraordinary and eccentric Margaret Masterman – linguist, logician, philosopher, religious devotee, and forgotten prophet of AI.

With the discovery of an archive that had remained unopened for nearly forty years, Peter de Bolla has pieced together the remarkable story of Masterman's creation and direction of the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU). Working on the fringes of the university, dismissed as an amateur and constrained by structural sexism, Margaret Masterman and the CLRU worked at an extraordinary pace to crack the problem of machine translation. Taking Turing's theoretical proposal of an 'electronic brain' and running furiously with it, they built the first machine that could think – a machine capable of engaging with human minds, and even, in Masterman's prophesised future, of doing philosophy alongside them.

Her audacious claim that a machine could generate meaning, not merely manipulate symbols made – and still makes – her both a prophetic voice and a heretic. Blending biography, intellectual history, the drama of scientific revolution, and the exhilarating discovery of AI, this book reveals how Masterman and her collaborators – from philosophers, linguists and botanists to quantum theorists – came to formulate a theory of language and mind that we are only now beginning to see in action in the large language models shaping our world today.

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Foreword

1. 'One day it will be possible to do think with machines'
2. 'Learning to generalize freely and fancifully': Masterman at Newnham, 1929 -1933
3. From theatre to commune: 1933-1951
4. Thinking machines: 1947-1952
5. The foundation of the CLRU: 1953 – 1956
6. Testing to destruction: 1957
7. The mechanization of thought processes: 1958 – 1961
8. Freeing the mind: 1962
9. 'I don't have words, I have phrases': The Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, 1965
10. 'Language is a dynamic corporate memory device': The breakthrough of 1968
11. 'Put on my tomb “This is what she was trying for”'

Appendix I: Timeline of early MT research.
Appendix II: Significant papers and publications of Margaret Masterman.

Product details

Published	12 Nov 2026
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Pages	264
ISBN	9781350643000
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Peter de Bolla

Peter de Bolla is Professor of Cultural History an…

This compelling and brilliantly-argued book charts the career of an exceptionally important and visionary figure in the history of artificial intelligence. It establishes the remarkable importance of Margaret Masterman, philosopher and pioneer, theologian and theorist, whose collaborative research and brilliant innovations established the bases for radical models of human and machine language. De Bolla's account completely changes every standard story of the history of AI and its direction of travel. This is a book that needs to be read by anyone concerned with the realities of artificial intelligence, the ways in which it has been designed, and its many possible futures.

Simon Schaffer, Emeritus Professor of History of Science, University of Cambridge, UK
Where did the idea of machine learning and artificial intelligence come from? One popular answer is Alan Turing, the brilliant Cambridge mathematician. But that is only part of the story: another key figure in this intellectual revolution was Margaret Masterman, a linguist and philosopher who has been written out of the history books thus far. Her tale, finally recorded in vivid style by Pete de Bolla, offers mesmerizing reading – demonstrating the vital role of long-ignored women in the AI revolution, the complexities and contradictions of the entire effort to "make machines think", and the degree to which breakthroughs in AI emerged not just from science but from the humanities as well. This is a vital message for us all at a time when AI is threatening to overturn our world. A tour de force!

Gillian Tett, author of Anthro-Vision (2022)
An original, quirky, unpredictable, utterly fascinating intellectual biography of one Margaret Masterman, whom, no, you've never heard of, even though she was among the great minds of the twentieth century and one of the most brilliant pioneers of what would come to be described as “AI”. How horrified she would be at what it's become. Read this for her story, her dash, her genius, but also for the deep and inspiring morality of her mission. What a terrific book.

Bill Buford, formerly the Literary & Fiction Editor of the New Yorker, is one of its frequent contributors.