No recent scientific enterprise has proved as alluring, terrifying, and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. 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 this book, 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, and 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.

Part I.Background. The roots of artificial intelligence -- Neural networks and the ascent of machine learning -- AI spring -- Part II. Looking and seeing. Who, what, when, where, why -- ConvNets and ImageNet -- A closer look at machines that learn -- On trustworthy and ethical AI -- Part III. Learning to play. Rewards for robots -- Game on -- Beyond games -- Part IV. Artificial intelligence meets natural language. Words, and the company they keep -- Translation as encoding and decoding -- Ask me anything -- Part V. The barrier of meaning. On understanding -- Knowledge, abstraction, and analogy in artificial intelligence -- Questions, answers, and speculations.