Skip to main content

A Brief Guide to Artificial Intelligence - James Stone ***(*)

Some brief guides miss the point and in reality go on for rather a long time, but this one very much does what it says on the tin. Readable in an hour, it gives us the basics of what modern artificial intelligence is and how it works. To achieve such brevity, James Stone has cut away much of the support mechanism of popular science - so we get very little background and historical context, limited storytelling and not much about applications. Instead, the focus is laser-sharp on delivering the basics of how neural networks work, where modern AI is successful and where it has a long way to go.

Broadly, Stone identifies two areas where AI triumphs - image recognition and playing games. If I'm honest, perhaps he is a little generous on the first of these - as he points out himself, tiny elements undetectable to the human eye can be sufficient to totally change what an image is recognised to be, and most of the techniques (he takes us through different types of machine learning) require a very large amount of training material where (again as Stone acknowledges) humans can often learn to recognise something with just a handful of examples. The AI technology is on firmer ground with its game playing - in chess, go, backgammon and a range of computer games, AI is now unbeatable, and teaching humans new approaches. What perhaps Stone doesn't emphasise enough is how much this demonstrates that AI's real success is in non-real world applications where the rules are clear and relatively simple, even if they haven't been specified to the system. In the real world, things are often more messy, again something that is acknowledged in, for example, being far less optimistic about self-driving cars than is often the case.

Stone gives us a good simple introduction to neural networks, back propagation, four different kinds of machine learning (from semi-supervised to reinforcement) and the dangers of overfitting, making it clear that even current AI is doing significantly more than curve fitting. The book (probably sensibly) brushes aside fears about AI might take over the world and displace humans as somewhat far fetched at the moment.

My only real disappointment was at the end of the book, where Stone tells us true AI is likely to emerge relatively soon, given it took just millions of years for flying to develop in the natural world, but just 66 to get from the Wright brothers to the Moon landing, citing acceleration of advancement that could be experimental. There are two problems with this. One is that the proper modern comparison with the Wright brothers is not space travel but commercial flights. These did indeed get much faster. The Wright brothers had an airspeed in the tens of miles per hour. Within 73 years, passengers could fly at 1,350 mph. But Concorde has now been withdrawn for nearly 20 years - instead of speeding up, we fly at less than half the speed. Even if you do take the leap from Wright brothers to Apollo - yes, that only took 66 years. But in over 50 years since we have done nothing comparable in space, let alone gone further and faster. Just because there was acceleration in the past does not mean it will continue.

I give the guide four stars for its solid, approachable and extremely brief introduction to the modern field, but three stars for lacking context and effective narrative. While approachable and doing the job admirably, it's not outstandingly particularly to read without that contextual material. Even so, for the right purpose it's an excellent little book.

Paperback:  
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more