Description
Book SynopsisA concise and illuminating history of the field of artificialintelligence from one of its earliest and most respectedpioneers.AI & I is an intellectual history of the field of artificialintelligence from the perspective of one of its firstpractitioners, Eugene Charniak. Charniak entered the field in 1967, roughly 12 yearsafter AI?s founding, and was involved in many of AI?s formativemilestones. In this book, he traces the trajectory of breakthroughsand disappointments of the discipline up to the current day, clearly and engagingly demystifying this oft revered and misunderstood technology. His argument is controversial but well supported: that classical AI has been almost uniformly unsuccessfuland that the modern deep learning approach should beviewed as the foundation for all the exciting developments thatare to come.
Written for the scientifically educated layperson, this book chronicles the history of the field of AI, starting with its origin in 1956, as a topic for a small academic workshop held at Dartmouth University. From there, the author covers reasoning and knowledge representation, reasoning under uncertainty, chess, computer vision, speech recognition, language acquisition, deep learning, and learning writ large. Ultimately, Charniak takes issue with the controversy of AI?the fear that its invention means the end of jobs, creativity, and potentially even humans as a species?and explains why such concerns are unfounded. Instead, he believes that we should embrace the technology and all its potential to benefit society.
