Michael Wooldridge Books

In the past twenty years, AI has transformed from a niche field with questionable reputation to the most speculated-about pursuit in contemporary culture. But how much of our perception of AI as self-aware, conscious and autonomous beings is a pipe dream cooked up by the charlatans and snake-oil salesmen of science? In The Road to Conscious Machines, Michael Wooldridge tells the story of AI, from its origins in the first Turing computers to DeepMind and newer innovations that will shape the next few decades. Mythbyusting AI's capabilities as logical, rational, intelligent, independent actors, Wooldridge makes a convincing case that most AI engineers are - like everyone -- just figuring things out as they go along. In this deft and detailed survey of AI's booms and busts, Wooldridge brings a healthy injection of humility to an overhyped field. AI appeals to fundamental questions about what it means to be human; so too do the failures and limitations of its past.

From Oxford's leading AI researcher comes a fun and accessible tour through the history and future of one of the most cutting edge and misunderstood field in Artificial IntelligenceThe somewhat ill-defined long-term aim of AI is to build machines that are conscious, self-aware, and sentient; machines capable of the kind of intelligent autonomous action that currently only people are capable of. As an AI researcher with 25 years of experience, professor Mike Wooldridge has learned to be obsessively cautious about such claims, while still promoting an intense optimism about the future of the field. There have been genuine scientific breakthroughs that have made AI systems possible in the past decade that the founders of the field would have hailed as miraculous. Driverless cars and automated translation tools are just two examples of AI technologies that have become a practical, everyday reality in the past few years, and which will have a huge impact on our world.While the dream of conscious machines remains, Professor Wooldridge believes, a distant prospect, the floodgates for AI have opened. Wooldridge's A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence is an exciting romp through the history of this groundbreaking field--a one-stop-shop for AI's past, present, and world-changing future.