Artificial Intelligence

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 Mitchell is one of the finest minds in computation today, and one of the clearest-spoken. She understands the power of a metaphor and why nearly all of the ones we have for AI are either simply poor, in the best of cases, or dangerously misleading. If you want to know where our current mayhem came from, read this account of the field -- Cat Bohannon author of Eve The recent resurgence of AI has led to predictions of everything from the end of the world to immortality. Melanie Mitchells very intelligent, clear and sensible book is a welcome corrective to the exaggerated fears and hopes for AI, and the prefect primer to start understanding how the systems actually work -- Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby Mitchell knows what shes talking about. Even better, shes a clear, cogent and interesting writer . . . It 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 * Chicago Tribune * 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 . . . Mitchells view is a reassuring one * The New Yorker *

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.