Originally ahead of its time, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has been featured on the WSJ and NYT's "5 Best Books on AI" lists. Now reissued with a stunning new cover and an updated introduction by the author.
 
No technological development in recent history has generated as much excitement and terror—both utopian visions and apocalyptic nightmares—as artificial intelligence. Since generative AI and Large Language Models exploded into our everyday lives in 2022, with the release of ChatGPT, AI has been the topic on everyone's mind. And Melanie Mitchell's acclaimed Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans has been a touchstone for the debates. With a new preface situating the book in the context of the rapid progress in AI development, Artificial Intelligence offers an essential account of AI’s turbulent history and a necessary exploration of the different kinds of AI—an accessible explanation of how they work, and how they fail.

In Artificial Intelligence, the award-winning author and leading computer scientist Melanie Mitchell turns to the most urgent questions concerning AI today. 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. Raising big questions about the nature of intelligence itself, she consults with fellow experts and 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 revelatory accounts of the most interesting and provocative work in the field. 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.
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
Melanie Mitchell has a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan, where she studied with the cognitive scientist and writer Douglas Hofstadter; together, they created the Copycat program, which makes creative analogies in an idealized world. The author and editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers, she is currently a professor of computer science at Portland State University and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.