The five best books to understand AI

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover "The Economist reads" guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. IN RECENT years artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a revolution. After decades of modest progress that never quite lived up to its promise, a different approach--relying on big data and stats, not clever algorithms--made huge strides in solving real-world problems like voice- and image-recognition and self-driving cars. Also in the past ten years, a lot of books have been published that aim to explain what AI is, where it's going and why it matters.