The Road to Conscious Machines

'A terrific book - essential reading for everyone seeking to make sense of Artificial Intelligence.' Professor Sir Adrian Smith, Director and Chief Executive of the Alan Turing Institute

'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, author of The AI Does Not Hate You

In this myth-busting guide to AI past and present, one of the world's leading researchers shows why our fears for the future are misplaced.

The ultimate dream of AI is to build machines that are like us: conscious and self-aware. While this remains a remote possibility, its rapid progress 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 challenges the prevailing narrative, revealing how these anxieties distract us from both the more immediate risks that this transformative technology poses - from algorithmic bias to fake news- and the true life-changing potential of the field. The Road to Conscious Machines elucidates the discoveries of its greatest pioneers from Alan Turing to Demis Hassabis, and shows us what today's AI researchers actually think and do. AI appeals to fundamental questions about what it means to be human; so too do the failures and limitations of its past.

'Nobody understands the past, the present, the promise and the peril of this new technology better than Michael Wooldridge. The definitive account of the new AI' Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist