Artificial Intelligence
A Guide for Thinking Humans
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Beschreibung des Verlags
“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 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 AI’s turbulent history and the recent spate of apparent successes, grand hopes, and emerging fears surrounding it.
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 models of modern AI and machine learning, describing cutting-edge AI programs, their human inventors, and the historical lines of thought underpinning recent achievements. She meets with fellow experts such as 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 further it has to go.
Interweaving stories about the science of AI and the people behind it, Artificial Intelligence brims with clear-sighted, captivating, and accessible accounts of the most interesting and provocative modern work in the field, flavored with Mitchell’s humor and personal observations. This frank, lively book is an indispensable guide to understanding today’s AI, its quest for “human-level” intelligence, and its impact on the future for us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mitchell (Complexity: A Guided Tour), a Portland State computer science professor, ably illustrates the current state of artificial intelligence, debunking claims about computers that match or surpass human intelligence. She begins with a meeting that she attended with Google's AI team alongside her former PhD advisor, Douglas Hofstadter, author of G del, Escher, Bach, who revealed he was "terrified" that a "superficial set of brute-force algorithms could explain the human spirit." Mitchell then examines various areas of AI research, including image recognition, question answering, game playing, and translation. Each example yields similar results; namely, that computers can be trained to master specific tasks as with the vaunted Jeopardy! win for IBM's Watson program but not to learn new abilities in general or truly understand meaning. Responding to claims by AI developers, Mitchell suggests that machines can never "fully understand human language until they have human-like common sense." Moreover, AI programs remain susceptible to errors and hacking, in part because they are surprisingly easily fooled. Taking care to keep the text accessible, Mitchell lightens things with amusing facts, such as how Star Trek's ship computer remains the gold standard for many AI researchers. This worthy volume should assuage lay readers' fears about AI, while also reassuring people drawn to the field that much work remains to be done.
