Wooldridge Michael. The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI

Pelican, 2018. — 388 p. — ISBN: 9780241333914.The ultimate dream of artificial intelligence is to build machines that are like us: conscious and self-aware. While this remains a remote possibility, rapid progress on AI in this century is already profoundly changing our world. Yet the public debate and media hype is still largely centred on unlikely prospects from sentient machines to dystopian robot takeovers.
In this lively and clear-headed guide, Michael Wooldridge brings a healthy injection of humility to an overhyped field and changes the prevailing narrative on AI, revealing how these anxieties distract us from the more immediate risks that this transformative technology poses - from algorithmic bias to fake news. He also shows us how they overlook the true life-changing potential of the field he loves.
The Road to Conscious Machines gives us the real story of AI, through all its booms and many busts, elucidating the discoveries of its greatest pioneers from Alan Turing to Demis Hassabis, and showing us what today's AI researchers actually think and do. As this deft and detailed survey reveals, AI appeals to fundamental questions about what it means to be human; so too do the failures and limitations of its past.Acknowledgements
Introduction part one: what is AI?
Turing’s Electronic Brains
How did we get here?
The Golden Age
Knowledge Is Power
Robots and Rationality
Deep Breakthroughs
Where are we going?
AI Today
How We Imagine Things Might Go Wrong
How Things Might Actually Go Wrong
Conscious Machines?Appendix
Understanding rules
Understanding Prolog
Understanding Bayes’ theorem
Understanding Neural Nets
Further reading
Notes