1 A Carefully Selected History

17

The World’s Most Successful Hoax

17

Algorithms

19

Analog Computers

20

Gödel, Turing, and von Neumann

21

A Field of Study Is Forged

25

Checkmate

26

The Drosophila of Reasoning

31

The Best Chess Player in the Universe

33

The Age of Machines

35

2 The Attempt to Make Machines Intelligent

39

Symbolic AI

39

Expert Systems

40

The ELIZA Effect

46

Winter and Spring

49

Machines That Learn

51

Supervised Learning

53

Flowers and Decision Trees

56

Subsymbolic AI

59

Neural Networks Through the Ages

63

Learning Anything

67

3 The Hunt for Data

73

The True Distribution

73

Data for Machine Learning

75

The Wrong Distribution

77

Bias for Statisticians and Journalists

80

Data Is Expensive

85

Long, Problematic Tails

87

Finding Your Own Data

89

4 Seeing Is Believing

97

A World of Matrices

97

Machines That Almost Understand What They’re Looking At

102

The Simple Answer Is Often Wrong

107

Machines That Understand More Than We Do

110

Artificial Intuition and Chess

114

Mental Health

117

Privacy

120

The Right to an Explanation

124

5 Is Anybody Home?

127

Artificial Conversation Partners

127

The Ghost in the Machine

130

ChatGPT and Concerned Teachers

135

Talk About Problems

140

A Turing Test for Consciousness

142

The Art of Creation

146

From Noise to Reality

153

6 Our Artificially Intelligent Life

161

The Machine Revolution

161

The World of Ethics

166

Someone Has to Decide

172

The War of the Currents and the AI Act

176

The Collective Action Problem of AI Development

181

Privacy in Flux

184

7 Attacking Machine Learning Models

191

Well-Behaved Machines with Good Intentions

191

Optical Illusions for Machines

194

Cutting Grass in Three Dimensions

198

The Curse of Dimensionality

200

The Back Way In

203

Winter and Politics

207

Autonomy and Control

213

8 Superintelligence and Other Speculation

221

Artificial Creativity

221

Speech and Acoustics

224

Data Use

226

AI Ethics and Moral Agents

228

Artificial General Intelligence and Superintelligence

231

Machine Goals, Human Goals, and Mesa-Optimization

238

A Brain Thinking About Itself

245