Today artificial intelligence (AI) is behind much of our technology from self-driving cars to facial recognition. How we got to this point is an interesting story and one that was not always foreordained. The men behind the current technology had a fight on their hands before their ideas were accepted by mainstream science.
In the early days of the field there were two routes to AI one espoused by Marvin Minsky at MIT, the other neural networks worked on by Geoff Hinton a cognitive psychologist and computer scientist in British Columbia. Minsky believed that neural networks were a dead end and tried to discourage that path, but Hinton persevered and today his is the paradigm behind the present explosion in technology.
Our current internet companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon and others rely heavily on AI for searches and devices like Alexa. One of the most exciting chapters in the book tells the story of the bidding war for Hinton’s technology. A bidding war that made him and his two students fabulously wealthy.
The book is not particularly technical. Rather it tells the stories of the main actors in the technical developments that were often a race to see which group could produce usable technology first. The book is based on nearly four-hundred interviews conducted by the author over an extended period when he worked for Wired and later for the New York Times.
I enjoyed the book very much. However, it you’re looking for a technical description of today’s AI, this is not the book you’re looking for. It’s written for a general audience and is heavy on personality and personal stories rather than deep technical details.
I received this book from Dutton for this review.
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