Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

A Guide for Thinking Humans

Summary

'After reading Mitchell’s guide, you’ll know what you don’t know and what other people don’t know, even though they claim to know it. And that’s invaluable'' The New York Times

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.

Reviews

  • 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

About the author

Melanie Mitchell

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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more