**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 science: Artificial Intelligence
**
The 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.