Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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, Founder and CEO of Robust.AI and c-oauthor of Rebooting AI
Review
"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, professor of mathematics, Cornell University, and author of Infinite Powers
Review
"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 prefect primer to start understanding how the systems actually work." Alison Gopnik, professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, and author of The Philosophical Baby
About the Author
Melanie Mitchell has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan, where she studied with the cognitive scientist and writer Douglas Hofstadter; together, they created the Copycat program, which makes creative analogies in an idealized world. The author or editor of several books (such as Complexity: A Guided Tour) and numerous scholarly papers, Mitchell is currently professor of computer science at Portland State University and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.