Melanie Mitchell (2)

Excellent overview of the major topics in AI, circa 2019. I like her writing style. It's easy to read, and she provides useful examples that illustrate key concepts. I found it enlightening, as a former expert myself, that many of the same issues and questions remain as in my heyday, albeit in somewhat different forms.

The perpetual 20+ year horizon to general AI remains firmly in place, IMHO, and is likely to stay there. I can't say it myself nearly as well as pioneer, Rodney Brooks, as quoted at the end of the book: "When AI got started, the clear inspiration was human level performance and human level intelligence... The fact that we do not have anything close to succeeding at those aspirations says not that researchers have not worked hard or have not been brilliant. It says that it is a very hard goal."… (mehr)

Really great book. The author (an AI researcher) explains how many of today's state of the art AI systems work. These include image recognition, game playing (like AlphaGo) and NLP systems like Google translate. The explanations for how those systems work are really good, with just the right amount of technical detail. We also get to see what the weak points of these systems are, and how far away we are from creating any true intelligence.
I have written quite a long review/summary of it on my blog: https://henrikwarne.com/2020/05/19/artificial-intelligence-a-guide-for-thinking-...… (mehr)