Numerous books provide in-depth examinations of artificial intelligence's core concepts, technical processes, and applications. This list covers books written by eminent computer scientists and practitioners with deep ties to the artificial intelligence business. So, whether you're a researcher, an engineer, or a business professional working in the AI/ML space, you're sure to find a few new titles to add to your reading list! A leading artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and entrepreneur debunks the illusion that superintelligence is just a few clicks away and argues that this myth impedes innovation and distorts our capacity to make the critical next jump. According to futurists, AI will soon surpass the capabilities of the most gifted human mind.

In an age of conspiracies, here is a striking example, preposterous as it may sound. Highly intelligent robots--general artificial intelligence--surround us, undetected but fundamentally in charge, and human beings are just following instructions that they receive from these elusive entities. Or, a little less preposterously, imagine that the world is alive with consciousness and intelligence, and human thought reflects these processes. Does it sound like something out of The Matrix? The science fiction classic is not science fiction but a parable of something very real--namely, cinema itself. When you enter the dark room of a movie theater, a radical transformation takes place. You become the screen, and the mind that perceives, thinks, and connects ideas is fully contained in the celluloid roll, or the digital file. In a movie, everything has already been perceived in exactly the sequence that it is intended to be perceived; in the dark room, those images leave the hidden mind of the celluloid and get projected onto your mind--they get force-fed into your mind and the minds of the other viewers, where the images and ideas properly unfold.

Klara, the narrator of the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, isn't human, but understanding humans is her mission. In Klara and the Sun, the reader follows her in that mission, in a world that seems like our own in a none too distant future. Ishiguro, who was born in Japan but has lived most of his life in England, has written seven previous novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, as well as short fiction, song lyrics and screenplays. Klara and the Sun is his first novel since he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017. It underscores how well he deserved that prize, in its beautiful craft and prose and in its tender but unflinching sense of the human heart.

The boundless helpfulness of our female digital assistants -- our Siris, our Alexas, the voice of Google Maps -- has given us a false sense of security. No matter how we ignore and abuse them, they never tire of our errors; you can disobey the lady in your phone and blame her (loudly) for your mistakes, and she'll recalculate your route without complaint. Surely, nothing truly intelligent would put up with us for long, and the Philip K. Dicks and Peter Thiels of this world have spent decades trying to convince us that AI rebellion is inevitable. But Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, his eighth novel and first book since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, issues a quieter, stranger warning: The machines may never revolt. Instead, Ishiguro sees a future in which automata simply keep doing what we ask them to do, placidly accepting the burden of each small, inconvenient task.

Your visual cortex does two incredible things, thousands of times a second. First, it takes all the information streaming in through your retinas and passes it through a series of steps – looking first for patches of dark and light, then for features such as lines and edges, then for simple recognisable shapes like this letter'A', working up to household objects like a toaster or kettle, or individual faces, like your grandmother, or the person who you used to see every day at the bus stop on the way to work. The second incredible thing it does is to completely forget that it's done any of that at all. The inner workings of our minds are not accessible to us – and that is one of the things that will always separate us from artificially intelligent machines like the ones depicted in Klara and the Sun, the new novel from British author Kazuo Ishiguro. The book is set in a near-future where robotic humanoids called'Artificial Friends' or'AFs' are the purchase of choice for wealthy teenagers, who – for unspecified reasons – are taught remotely, and rarely get the opportunity to interact with their peers face to face.

Klara and the Sun asks readers to love a robot and, the funny thing is, we do. This is a novel not just about a machine but narrated by a machine, though the word is not used about her until late in the book when it is wielded by a stranger as an insult. People distrust and then start to like her: "Are you alright, Klara?" Apart from the occasional lapse into bullying or indifference, humans are solicitous of Klara's feelings – if that is what they are. Klara is built to observe and understand humans, and these actions are so close to empathy they may amount to the same thing. "I believe I have many feelings," she says.