Today, Artificial Intelligence is the dominant topic of discussion with questions about its expected rate of growth and its impact on various aspects of human life. The outcry over ChatGPT is just one of the many examples in our midst. People want to understand how AI is going to affect their lives and Toby Walsh’s book is an outstanding read which deals with this topic comprehensively, in a very easy to understand manner.
For most people, terms like AI, machine learning, deep learning, internet of things and algorithmic bias seem extremely cryptic. Because of this, we don’t really try to understand these concepts properly and just stick to a surface level grasp of these issues. This would be fine for most technical things, except when these very things have the potential to permanently alter every aspect of our daily lives and humanity in general. Toby Walsh has kept this is mind throughout the book and explained these concepts beautifully, with analogies like comparing data to oil, examples of programmes and robots in use like COMPAS, real incidents like the US Presidential elections, while using simple language, all of which help a layman easily understand what the real problem is and what the probable solutions should be.