Rebooting AI, Gary Marcus
Rebooting AI, Gary Marcus
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Rebooting AI
Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

Author: Gary Marcus, Ernest Davis

Narrator: Kaleo Griffith

Unabridged: 7 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/10/2019


Synopsis

Two leaders in the field offer a compelling analysis of the current state of the art and reveal the steps we must take to achieve a truly robust artificial intelligence.

Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. Professors Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis have spent their careers at the forefront of AI research and have witnessed some of the greatest milestones in the field, but they argue that a computer beating a human in Jeopardy! does not signal that we are on the doorstep of fully autonomous cars or superintelligent machines. The achievements in the field thus far have occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules, and these approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine intelligence.

The real world, in contrast, is wildly complex and open-ended. How can we bridge this gap? What will the consequences be when we do? Taking inspiration from the human mind, Marcus and Davis explain what we need to advance AI to the next level, and suggest that if we are wise along the way, we won't need to worry about a future of machine overlords. If we focus on endowing machines with common sense and deep understanding, rather than simply focusing on statistical analysis and gatherine ever larger collections of data, we will be able to create an AI we can trust—in our homes, our cars, and our doctors' offices. Rebooting AI provides a lucid, clear-eyed assessment of the current science and offers an inspiring vision of how a new generation of AI can make our lives better.

About Gary Marcus

Gary Marcus is a professor of psychology at New York University and director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center. A high school dropout, Marcus received his Ph.D. at age twenty-three from MIT, where he was mentored by Steven Pinker. He was a tenured professor by age thirty. The author of the Norton Psychology Reader, he has been a fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and other major publications.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Scott on December 14, 2020

This book had a masterful balance of possible growth and realistic limits. It got technical enough to be specific but not so much that it got dry. Best AI book I’ve read yet.......more

Goodreads review by Nicole on July 02, 2022

Rating: 3.5 This book took me way too long to read, the only thing that slightly redeemed the endless repetition was the cheeky jokes. You'd think that a book praising the human mind for its ability to make inferences would shut the fuck up once and a while and let the reader infer -_- Writing aside,......more

Goodreads review by Divyansh on August 17, 2023

Short, informational, memorable. A little repetitive but still makes a good case for all the things missing in mainstream AI at the moment (broadly, common sense and reasoning). Critical, without being dismissive of the current narrow-domain deep learning based 'AI'. They emphasize the importance of......more

Goodreads review by Harsha on August 09, 2020

This book is written for lay audience who tend to get carried away by impressive headlines. It is a tale of caution to not get excited by the current progress in AI and communicate the research at its scale; not make an exorbitant story out of it. This is important. Not only news articles but even r......more

Goodreads review by Lucille on August 16, 2022

Derivative work that draws from others. Generally acceptable for a non-specialist audience, but contains assertions about cognitive science and psychology regarding human intelligence vs. artificial intelligence that may prove short-sighted and premature. Nonetheless, the prescriptions for how to vi......more


Quotes

“Artificial intelligence is among the most consequential issues facing humanity, yet much of today’s commentary has been less than intelligent: awe-struck, credulous, apocalyptic, uncomprehending. Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, experts in human and machine intelligence, lucidly explain what today’s AI can and cannot do, and point the way to systems that are less A and more I.”
—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and the author of How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought
 
“Finally, a book that tells us what AI is, what AI is not, and what AI could become if only we are ambitious and creative enough. No matter how smart and useful our intelligent machines are today, they don’t know what really matters. Rebooting AI dares to imagine machine minds that goes far beyond the closed systems of games and movie recommendations to become real partners in every aspect of our lives.” 
—Garry Kasparov, Former World Chess Champion and author of Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
 
“Finally, a book that says aloud what so many AI experts are really thinking. Every CEO should read it, and everyone else at the company, too. Then they’ll be able to separate the AI wheat from the chaff, and know where we are, how far we have to go, and how to get there.”
—Pedro Domingos, Professor of computer science at the University of Washington and author of The Master Algorithm
 
“A welcome antidote to the hype that has engulfed AI over the past decade and a realistic look at how far AI and robotics still have to go.”
—Rodney Brooks, former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
 
“AI is achieving superhuman performance in many narrow applications, but the reality is that we are still very far from artificial general intelligence that truly understands the world. Marcus and Davis explain the pitfalls of current approaches with humor and insight, and provide a compelling path toward the kind of robust AI that can earn our trust.”
—Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT and co-author of The Second Machine Age and Machine | Platform | Crowd

 
Rebooting AI is a blast to read. It's erudite, it's witty, and it neatly unpacks why today's AI has such trouble doing truly smart tasks—and what it'll take to reach that goal.”
—Clive Thompson, Wired magazine columnist and author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
 
“Will machines overtake humans in the foreseeable future, or is it just hype? Marcus and Davis lay out their answer with elegant prose and a sure quill, drawing the distinction between today’s deep-learning based narrow, brittle artificial “intelligence” and the ever-elusive artificial general intelligence. Common sense and trust, which are intrinsically human, emerge as grand challenges for the field. If you plan to read one book to keep up with AI—this is an outstanding choice!”
—Oren Etzioni, CEO of Allen institute for AI & Professor of computer science at University of Washington. 
 
“Artificial intelligence is here to stay. What are its achievements, its prospects, its pitfalls and misdirected initiatives—and how might these be remedied and overcome? This lucid and deeply informed account, from a critical but sympathetic perspective, is a valuable guide to developments that will surely have a major impact on the social order and intellectual culture.”
—Noam Chomsky

“When I was a child I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and then read everything I could about AI. All the smart people said it was twenty years away.  Twenty years later I was an adult and the smart people said that AI was twenty years away. Twenty years after that we passed 2001 and the smart people said it was about twenty years away.  Yup, it’s getting better and better, but it still ain’t HAL. It can tag photos pretty good but on understanding stories my son passed all the AI before he went to his stupid preschool. Now is the time to listen to  smarter people: in Rebooting AI, Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis do a great job separating truth from bullshit to understand why we might not have real A.I. in twenty years and what we can do to get way closer.”
—Penn Jillette, Emmy-winning magician and actor and New York Times best-belling author

“A must-read for anyone who cares about the future of artificial intelligence, filled with masterful storytelling and clear and easy-to-digest examples. Simultaneously puncturing hype and plotting a new course towards toward truly successful AI, Rebooting AI offers the first rational look at what AI can and can’t do, and what it will take to build AI that we can genuinely trust. And it does it in a way that engages the reader and ultimately celebrates both what AI has accomplished and the strengths and power of the human mind.”
—Annie Duke, best-selling author of Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts