Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

Author: Melanie Mitchell Year: 2019 Genre: Artificial Intelligence

About This Book

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a captivating account of modern-day artificial intelligence by leading AI researcher Melanie Mitchell. Writing with clarity and passion, Mitchell offers an accessible and clear-eyed view of the AI landscape, what the field has actually accomplished, and how much further it has to go.

Key Insights

• Narrow competence vs understanding: Modern systems excel at pattern recognition but struggle with causality, abstraction, and common sense.
• Benchmarks are not intelligence: Scores can be brittle, exploit shortcuts, and fail to generalise beyond the test distribution.
• Scaling has limits: More data and compute improve performance, but do not magically produce human-like reasoning.
• Interpretability and robustness: We still lack reliable explanations for model behaviour; safety and reliability remain open problems.
• Human comparison is nuanced: Machines and people think differently; anthropomorphism leads to poor expectations and decisions.
• History informs hype: Recurrent cycles of boom and winter show why critical thinking about grand claims is essential.

Why I Recommend It

Mitchell offers a clear, hype-free account of what today’s AI can and cannot do. She connects history, psychology, and computer science to explain strengths and limitations without jargon.

If you build products with AI—or make decisions affected by it—this book helps calibrate expectations, avoid overclaiming, and focus on where AI genuinely adds value.