Artificial Intelligence

A Guide for Thinking Humans

By: Melanie Mitchell

Narrated by: Abby Craden, Melanie Mitchell, Tony Wolf

This program includes an introduction read by the author.

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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Melanie Mitchell (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

Great Overview of Everything AI

As someone who is looking for general knowledge about AI, I don’t think any book could have given me a better summary.

A great cure for all the hype about AI!

These days we're literally flooded by news stories and other reports about AI. Indeed it is an important subject and we should all learn about it. But we need a knowledgeable and talented writer to cut through the hype and teach us what AI is, how it works, what it can and cannot do, and what we should be most concerned about. An expert on complex systems, Melanie Mitchell is also deep thinker and active practitioner in the field of AI. In this fine book she gives us an interesting history of the field, and then takes us under the hood so that we have at least some basic knowledge of how Large Language Models and other AI systems actually work. No technical background is required, though the thoughtful reader will want to do more than skim. (The book is full of examples and easy to read illustrations.) Most importantly, the author explains the huge gap between human intelligence and all present AI models. She warns us not to fear sci-fi scenarios about super intelligent computers taking over the world. The real problem is the premature deployment of AI systems, precisely because they are not sufficiently intelligent.

I "read" the audiobook of this title. The illustrations are given in a PDF. The reader is excellent, a pleasure to listen to, always reading at a pace appropriate for the material.

Excellent perspective on the field

Melanie Mitchell has done a great job summarizing the state of AI research. She touches on the most important advances, ideas and problems in the field. She gives due credit for the amazing progress that has been made while tapering the hype and expectations that has been overblown by some media outlets. She makes a great case for analogy-making as a crucial technique needed for AI systems to advance further towards human-like performance.

WARNING: If you like to listen to audiobooks while otherwise engaged (e.g. while exercising), this book may not be for you. There are over 50 figures in the accompanying PDF of this book and many of these illustrations are crucial to understanding the explanations of AI systems like Conv Nets and reinforcement learning. As someone who was already familiar with these topics, i didn’t lose much from not viewing them, but beware if these ideas are new to you.

Great historic review and prediction blunders

The book in engaging and it brilliantly described the history of the development of different branches of AI. It's amazing to read it four years after it was first published and finding out that 90% of what it predicted "impossible" for deep learning has already been achieved.

clear, informative, reasonable, excellent

The reader gets a good overview (although I would assume at a pretty basic level), of where artificial intelligence and machine learning are positioned at present. The book is neither too easy not too hard. On the whole, hers is a sensible and somewhat deflationary (compared to many popular accounts) account of the powers of artificial intelligence and machine learning now and in the foreseeable future.

Strong overview of the conceptual state of AI

This is a quick introduction into how modern AI systems work, along with some extended discussion around the philosophy of said systems. I was working on something that is incorporating AI and it's exactly what I needed for me to wrap my head around how the systems work and what their strengths and limitations are.

An added benefit is that I can confidently say to my wife that we are in no danger of artificial intelligence having human level thoughts and feelings at any time in the near future.

Great History and Update on AI

I love this book it is both substantial, but not overly technical. It really caught me up on what has happened in the last 40 years since I majored in computer science.

Great Read

Well informed and dives deep into technical areas without alienating the laity (like myself). If you want to know more about AI this is a great start. As relevant at the time of this review (2023) as it was at publication.

Other reviews have said the narrator was robotic but I didn’t find that to be the case. You can always sample before you buy if that’s an issue for you.

Loved it.

Makes you feel that it isn’t too late to join the field. Catches reader up to speed on ai development with very little groundless embellishment. Melanie Mitchell is the best.

Great content

Thought the whole thing was very well done. I’m not gonna say it passed the Turing Test with my family though...that narrator had to have been an AI.