Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

Artificial intelligence has firmly entered our lives, taking root in an incredibly broad field—from space stations to home computers. Our main hopes and fears about the future are connected precisely with its development. It seems, above all, that it will determine what our future will be. Melanie Mitchell’s book, on the one hand, brings together all the main work in this direction that exists today—in other words, it explains what AI can already do, what it cannot do, and what it is learning right now. On the other hand, the book reviews the main futurist forecasts, trying to imagine what our world will be like in the foreseeable future—and, most importantly, it attempts to answer the question of whether a machine endowed with AI is truly a completely new stage in the evolution of humankind—an evolution that will proceed from now on not along biological, but technological, lines.