The Road to Conscious Machines

'A penetrating and lucid contribution to our digital understanding. Authoritative, accessible and highly readable.' - Lord Clement-Jones CBE, Chair of the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence 2017-2018'Calm, informative and refreshingly free of hype, Wooldridge's effortlessly readable book is the perfect guide to the history and future of AI.' - Tom Chivers, science writer and author of 'The AI Does Not Hate You' In this mythbusting guide to AI past and present, one of the world's leading researchers shows why our fears for the future are misplacedThe ultimate dream of artificial intelligence is to build machines that are like us: conscious and self-aware. While this remains a remote possibility, rapid progress on AI in this century is already profoundly changing our world.

Yet the public debate and media hype is still largely centred on unlikely prospects from sentient machines to dystopian robot takeovers. In this lively and clear-headed guide, Michael Wooldridge brings a healthy injection of humility to an overhyped field and changes the prevailing narrative on AI, revealing how these anxieties distract us from the more immediate risks that this transformative technology poses - from algorithmic bias to fake news. He also shows us how they overlook the true life-changing potential of the field he loves.

The Road to Conscious Machines gives us the real story of AI, through all its booms and many busts, elucidating the discoveries of its greatest pioneers from Alan Turing to Demis Hassabis, and showing us what today's AI researchers actually think and do. As this deft and detailed survey reveals, AI appeals to fundamental questions about what it means to be human; so too do the failures and limitations of its past.