Artificial Intelligence Paperback – November 17, 2020

The first book I read by Melanie Mitchell was "Complexity: A Guided Tour," which was amazing. I looked forward to reading her current offering and was not disappointed. It is a terrific read.The author did a comprehensive overview of the present-day state of AI, with appropriate deeper dives here and there.Notable positives of the book include (in no particular order)1) A conversational writing style along with nice anecdotes.2) A good sense of humor (and wonder).3) Lots of figures and diagrams, which really help comprehension.4) A nice historical overview of the field.5) Lots of quotable material, for example, Marvin Minsky's observation that, "easy things are hard." Can you imagine an AI system being good at playing charades or Pictionary?6) Well-defined technical terms.7) Lots of practical philosophical and psychological perspectives.8) Dealing with workable definitions of "suitcase words," that is, words that are like overstuffed suitcases with a variety of contents. Suitcase words crucial to AI include, “understanding, intelligence, common sense, and meaning."9) A nice section on natural language processing.10) A new concept to me, "adversarial learning," which is about the vulnerability of AI systems to malicious attack.11) The final chapter with its thoughtful speculation on AI’s future.Notable negatives: Nothing in particular. I would have loved to have seen a chapter with the title something like, "Artificial Stupidity," with examples where AI systems fail both with hilarious (translations) and not-so hilarious (autonomous vehicles) consequences. To be fair, the author scattered instances of these throughout the book. Also, the ethics of AI could have been fleshed out a bit more.Bottom-line – This is the best book on AI for the general science/technology reader.

Thank you Prof Melanie Mitchell for the labor of love and commitment required to create your latest book, Artificial Intelligence A guide for Thinking Humans."The book is divided into four parts, with the first part serving as an introduction with appropriate historical background, and an update on current important concepts, developments and supporting terminology.Following the introduction, one core aspect of the book are the three main parts-- each with multiple chapters-- where Melanie explains the fundamentals, workings and applications of of of neural networks and image processing (Part II, Looking and Seeing), of reinforcement learning and game playing (Part III, Learning to Play), and of language processing (Part IV: Artificial Intelligence Meet Natural Language).If you are a manager or policy maker who desires a technically accurate and precise description of the foundations and key enabling mechanisms of these AI capabilities-- in order to strengthen your own understanding--- and your own "mental models" of what this technology is and how it really works--- the descriptions in this book are amongst the very best descriptions I have every come across (and I do a lot of reading in this area for both technical specialist and for broader audiences).The second core aspect of this book is the final part (Part V: The Barrier of Meaning) where Melanie beautifully develops the frameworks, concepts, illustrations and examples you need to deeply understand what it really means for humans to understand "meaning" and context, and to make intelligent inferences, predictions, abstractions and analogies based on this ability versus what very brittle and very limited ability of state-of-the-art AI systems to do so.Just these four chapters in Part V ( On Understanding; Knowledge, Abstraction, and Analogy in Artificial Intelligence; and Questions, Answers, and Speculations) justifies the effort to purchase and carefully read this book.I think Prof Melanie Mitchell has done modern society a great service by creating this book. She makes it possible for a broad range of people-- from a broad range of backgrounds--- to seriously understand the marvels of AI capabilities and accomplishments, how these capabilities and accomplishments are actually realized through computational methods, the limits of these abilities, why these limits exist, and how these machine-based computational methods that we refer to as Artificial Intelligence compare to human capabilities for understanding and intelligence.For those of you who look for this type of material to read, it is also important to know about the recently published book, "Rebooting AI" by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis. I have read both of these books cover-to-cover, carefully. My advice-- get both of these books and read both of them. They do have overlapping concerns, and do cover some of the same types of concepts. But they go about it in very different ways. Both books are technically accurate, and have a lot of great examples. Both books will give you much deeper insight into the capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art AI (both now, and in the foreseeable future). But they go about it in different ways, and with different styles. So I will refrain from prioritizing one book over the other, as each has its own approach, emphasis, and style. If you enjoy this type of topic, and want to learn more from people who write well, AND who have very deep understanding of these topics--- then go get both of these books, absorb them, understand them, and go on a campaign to make sure all of your friends and professional colleagues understand the key messages of both of these books.