Ask HN: Best books on AI?

Though it is an academic book, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig.

The first chapter in the book provides a detailed analysis of how other disciplines contribute to the idea of AI - from Philosophy to Psychology, Biology to Computer Science. Makes for an interesting read, even for a non-tech reader.

If you want to get into actually implementing deep neural nets (what everyone is calling "AI" these days), then look at TensorFlow and Keras.

This is a good getting started book for TensorFlow:

https://www.amazon.com/TensorFlow-Machine-Learning-Cookbook-...

Superintelligence by nick bostrom. It's a book that explores how superintelligence could emerge, the different ways it can take off and what it means to us as humans. More importantly, the book takes on the difficult task of figuring out ways to make sure the AI is safe and not land up in the wrong hands. Pretty interesting read that doesnt really require technical know-how.

Well, it's not very nice to talk about people spending decades on failure, but I guess I can give some examples.

Cycorp still exists, from 1984. However, D. Lenat's approach to AI by ontology engineering has basically been completely infertile after about the early 90's.

Feigenbaum's expert systems stuff was a basic bust, it led to the Japanese just throwing that stuff away. People spent an incredible amount of effort and time systematizing expert knowledge and making expert systems and it was not a happy time. Much of that knowledge went into probabilistic forms, culminating in the Bayes net. The most famous application of Bayes net: Clippy (there are a lot more successful applications, but still...)

It was believed shortly after the AI conference that computer vision could be solved by a summer project in the 50's. That didn't happen.