Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

'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 Gazzaniga

A leading computer scientist brings human sense to the AI bubble

No recent scientific enterprise has been so alluring, terrifying and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. Writing with clarity and passion, leading AI researcher Melanie Mitchell offers a captivating account of modern-day artificial intelligence.

Flavoured with personal stories and a twist of humour, Artificial Intelligence illuminates the workings of machines that mimic human learning, perception, language, creativity and common sense. Weaving together advances in AI with cognitive science and philosophy, Mitchell probes the extent to which today's 'smart' machines can actually think or understand, and whether AI even requires such elusive human qualities at all.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans provides readers with an accessible and clear-eyed view of the AI landscape, what the field has actually accomplished, how much further it has to go and what it means for all of our futures.

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 Gazzaniga, author of The Consciousness Instinct

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 The Joy of X

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 -- Sean Carroll, author of The Big Picture

A must read for anyone interested in the emerging revolution of AI, machine learning and big data. Mitchell lays bare the hyperbole and misconceptions that are being propagated in the media. 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

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

Melanie Mitchell deftly provides the reader with a keen, clear-sighted account of the history of AI and neural networks. A wonderfully informative book -- John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy

Melanie Mitchell is a professor of Computer Science at Portland State University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms and Complexity: A Guided Tour, which won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award.