Artificial Intelligence
How It Works and How We Can Use It to Create a Better World
Nick Polson e James Scott
First published
2018
Pages
378
PDF language
Portuguese (Portugal)
Field
Science
About the book
In Artificial Intelligence, Nick Polson and James Scott open the black box of a technology already quietly woven into everyday life: Netflix recommendations, self-driving cars, facial recognition, medical diagnoses, machine translation, digital assistants, fraud detection and systems capable of learning patterns from oceans of data. AI ceases to appear as distant science fiction and reveals itself as a present, practical and pervasive force, reshaping the twenty-first century with an impact comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth.
But this book does not explain artificial intelligence through cold equations or technical jargon. It explains it through human stories: Abraham Wald and Second World War aircraft, Henrietta Leavitt and the measurement of the Universe, Thomas Bayes and probability, Grace Hopper and computer languages, Isaac Newton and anomaly detection, Florence Nightingale and data-driven medicine. Each figure reveals a piece of the mechanism: missing data, patterns, prediction, natural language, variability, decision-making, bias and ageing models.
The work’s great strength lies in showing that AI is neither magic nor artificial consciousness: it is an architecture of probabilities, algorithms, data and learning. Machines do not ‘think’ as we do; they learn to recognise relationships, estimate possibilities and produce useful decisions within specific domains. Precisely for this reason, the book also explores the critical questions: privacy, manipulation, targeted marketing, bias, faulty assumptions, obsolete models and automated decisions that can amplify both human intelligence and human weaknesses.
Artificial Intelligence is a journey into the hidden present of digital civilisation. It turns AI from a vague threat into a comprehensible language, showing that the future will be built not only by intelligent machines, but by human beings clear-sighted enough to understand how they work, where they fail and how they can be used to create a better world.