Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019

Available from:
Macmillan
Amazon
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Translations:
Chinese
Japanese
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French
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No recent scientific enterprise has proved as alluring, terrifying, and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. The award-winning author Melanie Mitchell, a leading computer scientist, now reveals its turbulent history and the recent surge of apparent successes, grand hopes, and emerging fears that surround AI.

In Artificial Intelligence, Mitchell turns to the most urgent questions concerning AI today: How intelligent—really—are the best AI programs? How do they work? What can they actually do, and when do they fail? How humanlike do we expect them to become, and how soon do we need to worry about them surpassing us? Along the way, she introduces the dominant methods of modern AI and machine learning, describing cutting-edge AI programs, their human inventors, and the historical lines of thought that led to recent achievements. She meets with fellow experts like Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the modern classic Gödel, Escher, Bach, who explains why he is "terrified" about the future of AI. She explores the profound disconnect between the hype and the actual achievements in AI, providing a clear sense of what the field has accomplished and how much farther it has to go.

Interweaving stories about the science and the people behind it, Artificial Intelligence brims with clear-sighted, captivating, and approachable accounts of the most interesting and provocative modern work in AI, flavored with Mitchell's humor and personal observations. This frank, lively book will prove an indispensable guide to understanding today's AI, its quest for "human-level" intelligence, and its impacts on all of our futures.

Sample from audiobook: https://soundcloud.com/macaudio-2/artificial-intelligence-by-melanie-mitchell-audiobook-excerpt/

Prologue: Terrified

Part I: Background

1. The Roots of Artificial Intelligence

2. Neural Networks and the Ascent of Machine Learning

3. AI Spring

Part II: Looking and Seeing

4. Who, What, When, Where, Why

5. ConvNets and ImageNet

6. A Closer Look at Machines That Learn

7. On Trustworthy and Ethical AI

Part III: Learning to Play

8. Rewards for Robots

9. Game On

10. Beyond Games

Part IV: Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Language

11. Words, and the Company They Keep

12. Translation as Encoding and Decoding

13. Ask Me Anything

Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

14. On Understanding

15. Knowledge, Abstraction, and Analogy in Artificial Intelligence

16. Questions, Answers, and Speculations

"Artificial intelligence can trounce you at chess, but will mistake a school bus for an ostrich or make bizarre connections between birds and hydrants. Mitchell cuts through the hype that the field of A.I. is often prone to and lays out what it does well, where it fails, and how it might do better."
—George Musser, author of Spooky Action at a Distance

"The recent resurgence of AI has led to predictions of everything from the end of the world to immortality. Melanie Mitchell's very intelligent, clear and sensible book is a welcome corrective to the exagerated fears and hopes for AI, and the perfect primer to start understanding how the systems actually work."
—Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby

"Melanie Mitchell writes about AI with a warm, friendly voice and an unpretentious brilliance that no machine could hope to match...for now."
—Steven Strogatz, author of Infinite Powers

"Melanie Mitchell''s book is a must read for anyone interested in the emerging revolution of AI, machine learning and big data. This book can be, and should be, read by the proverbial man or woman-on-the-street, the Silicon Valley guru, members of congress, or a student of the humanities, as well as by professional scientists and engineers. They will all profit enormously from it."
—Geoffrey West, author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies

"If you think you understand AI and all of the related issues, you don't. By the time you finish this exceptionally lucid and riveting book you will breathe more easily and wisely."
—Michael S. Gazzaniga, author of The Consciousness Instinct

"Computers are capable of feats of astonishing intelligence, while at the same time lacking any semblance of common sense. Melanie Mitchell takes us through an enlightening tour of how artificial intelligence currently works, and how it falls short of true human understanding. The challenges and opportunities discussed in this book will be crucial in shaping the future of humanity and technology."
—Sean Carroll, author of Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

"What is most impressive is that without getting too technical, Mitchell sketches enough details and clever illustrations that one gets a good intuitive understanding of AI, both its special purpose machines and its attempts at developing a more general intelligence. A wonderfully informative book."
—John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences

"Melanie Mitchell nails it: current AI does all kinds of neat tricks, but there's no real understanding there, and until there is, we will never get to the real promise of AI."
—Gary Marcus, coauthor of Rebooting AI

Wall Street Journal: "Distinguished computer scientists who can write well and explain difficult concepts clearly to a lay audience are worth their weight in semiconductors, as are AI technologists who are free from hype and bluster. In this compact book, Melanie Mitchell is sparing about what we really need to know yet equips us with enough information to understand the technological strides behind everything from ChatGPT to autonomous vehicles."

New York Times: "The story Mitchell tells is chronological and detailed, encompassing the intellectual breakthroughs of the Dartmouth College group that coined the term artificial intelligence in the mid-1950s as well as the advent of natural processing language in the 2010s. She answers essential questions about artificial intelligence simply and elegantly."

Chicago Tribune: "Mitchell knows what she's talking about. Even better, she's a clear, cogent and interesting writer . . . Artificial Intelligence has significantly improved my knowledge when it comes to automation technology, [but] the greater benefit is that it has also enhanced my appreciation for the complexity and ineffability of human cognition."

The New Yorker: "Without shying away from technical details, this survey provides an accessible course in neural networks, computer vision, and natural-language processing, and asks whether the quest to produce an abstracted, general intelligence is worrisome . . . Mitchell's view is a reassuring one."

Christian Science Monitor: "[A] lucid, clear-eyed account of the state of AI".

Wall Street Journal: "Ms. Mitchell explores some of AI's main domains: visual recognition, reinforcement learning and language processing. In each area she explains the nuts and bolts, praises headline-grabbing breakthroughs, and then gives a reality check to those who might see human-like general intelligence in narrow exploits."

Prospect: "[A]n authoritative stroll through the development and state of play of this field."

Skeptic: "There are a lot of books about artificial intelligence...Melanie Mitchell's new book is...in my opinion after surveying much of this literature, the most intelligent book on the subject."

Undark: "What is thinking and what is intelligence?...[This book] provides readers with insightful, common-sense scrutiny of how these and related topics pervade the discipline of artificial intelligence."

OneZero: "A remarkably clear and readable primer".

Publishers Weekly: "This worthy volume should assuage lay readers' fears about AI, while also reassuring people drawn to the field that much work remains to be done."

Kirkus Reviews: "[M]ostly a surprisingly lucid introduction to techniques that are making computers smarter."

Library Journal: "[The book's] historical grounding makes for a worthy and compelling narrative in itself. There are also ample contemporary topics explored in great detail, such as AI applications in image recognition, autonomous vehicles, voice recognition, and the impressive translation that today's popular search engines now provide."

Tech Talks: "[A]n invaluable and necessary read."

Popular Science: "Without a doubt, Mitchell's book sets a new standard in giving an understanding of what's possible and how difficult it is to go further. It should be read by every journalist, PR person and politician before they pump out yet more hype on the AI future."

The Enlightened Economist: "[This book describes] wonderfully clearly how different AI applications actually work, and hence helps understand their strengths and limitations. I would say these are the most illuminating simple yet meaningful explanations I've read of — for example — reinforcement learning, convolutional neural networks, word vectors, etc. I wish I'd had this book when I first started reading some of the AI literature."

Visual Business Intelligence Blog: "[T]his book describes AI in clear and accessible terms. It cuts through the hype to present a sane assessment with no agenda apart from a desire to inform."

Henrik Warne's blog: "This book on how...current [AI] systems work was a joy to read. It was clear, concise, and very interesting, and I learned a lot from it."

Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines: "The book, with its engaging and straightforward language and meticulously planned out content, is a lifesaver for a broad range of non-technical readership interested in investigating or dealing with the implications of AI on humans and humanity."

Lifeenhancer4u blog: "Mitchell's work equips us to interact with AI in an active, responsible, and critical manner in addition to providing us with information about it."

India Capital Growth blog (Amul Pandya)

Laurent Bloch's blog (in French)

EchoSciences Occitanie by Olivier Moch (in French)

3 Textos Para Pensar Como un Robot by Sofia González Barboza (in Spanish)

Santiago Ferrís's blog (in Spanish)

Gestalt Error 409 by Carl F. Then (in German)

L'Opinione delle Liberta by Manlio Lo Presti (in Italian)

Principia by Eros Moreira De Carvalho (in Portuguese)

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