As well as playing a key role in cracking the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and conceiving of the modern computer, the British mathematician Alan Turing owes his public reputation to the test he devised in 1950. Crudely speaking, it asks whether a human judge can distinguish between a human and an artificial intelligence based only on their responses to conversation or questions. This test, which he called the "imitation game," was popularised 15 years later in Philip K Dick's science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But Turing is also widely remembered as having committed suicide in 1954, quite probably driven to it by the hormone treatment he was instructed to take as an alternative to imprisonment for homosexuality (deemed to make him a security risk), and it is only comparatively recently that his genius has been afforded its full due. In 2009, Gordon Brown apologised on behalf of the British government for his treatment; in 2014, his posthumous star rose further again when Benedict Cumberbatch played him in The Imitation Game; and in 2021, he will be the face on the new £50 note.

When Elon Musk and Jack Ma famously sat down for a chat about AI, their thoughts were inspiring for some and excruciating for others. They discussed AI in an all-too-common display of fantastical forecasts and philosophical musings. The status quo of conversations about AI shoots us into the future, where we're allowed to get far ahead of ourselves simply because such discussions are admittedly more fun. We need to get back to the present, so that we may actually solve the problems standing in the way of our projected future. For that, I recommend a new book, Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, which has set off a buzz in the land of AI enthusiasts and skeptics alike.

The book Rebooting AI explains why a different approach other than deep learning is needed to unlock the potential of AI. Authors Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis propose that AI programs will have to have a large body of knowledge about the world in general, represented symbolically. Some of the basic elements of that knowledge should be built in. InfoQ readers can read excerpts of Rebooting AI to get an impression of the book. InfoQ interviewed Marcus and Davis about the state of the practice of AI and main concerns, the limitations of deep learning and their suggestion for bringing "common sense" to machine learning, what's needed to make AI safe and trustworthy, and what they expect AI can bring us in the near future and what will take a longer time.

Welcome to TechTalks' AI book reviews, a series of posts that explore the latest literature on AI. The media is rife with stories that warn of AI algorithms bringing people back from the dead, AI algorithms developing secret languages, mass technological unemployment, and a looming robot apocalypse. Movies and TV series like Her, The Circleand Westworld,which present a mystic portrayal of conscious machines and human-level AI being just around the corner. Rebooting AI is a refreshing read and a much-needed reality check on the current confusing state of artificial intelligence. Consider the following text, mentioned in Rebooting AI: "Elsie tried to reach her aunt on the phone, but she didn't answer." You don't need to be a genius to quickly make the following assumptions after reading this sentence: But even the most sophisticated AI algorithm would struggle to draw the same conclusions.

Welcome to TechTalks' AI book reviews, a series of posts that explore the latest literature on AI. The media is rife with stories that warn of AI algorithms bringing people back from the dead, AI algorithms developing secret languages, mass technological unemployment, and a looming robot apocalypse. Movies and TV series like Her, The Circle and Westworld, which present a mystic portrayal of conscious machines and human-level AI being just around the corner. Rebooting AI is a refreshing read and a much-needed reality check on the current confusing state of artificial intelligence. Consider the following text, mentioned in Rebooting AI: "Elsie tried to reach her aunt on the phone, but she didn't answer." You don't need to be a genius to quickly make the following assumptions after reading this sentence: But even the most sophisticated AI algorithm would struggle to draw the same conclusions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged from relative dormancy to a worldwide renaissance--fueled by significant investments and arousing interest across nearly all sectors and industries. Amid this global ground swell of enthusiasm, a few voices are going against popular opinion, and are calling for a reboot. Robust.AI CEO Gary Marcus and NYU professor of computer science Ernest Davis, sound a warning bell for AI in their book Rebooting AI, released in September 2019. Gary Marcus is a modern-day polymath. He is a cognitive scientist, successful technology entrepreneur, prolific author, keynote speaker, professor emeritus at New York University (NYU), juggler, unicyclist and erstwhile guitarist who literally wrote the book on it with his bestseller Guitar Zero: The Science of Becoming Musical at Any Age.

For most of the past sixty years, a rich critique of artificial intelligence was avidly pursued, mostly by insiders, people either practicing AI or interested onlookers who were in close proximity. Now the world finds itself in a strange state: Just as AI has gone mainstream, showing up everywhere from your Instagram feed to your smartphone voice assistant, many of those voices of criticism have been lost as a generation of thinkers passed away, people like MIT scientist Marvin Minsky and UC Berkeley professor of philosophy Herbert Dreyfus. But a small contingent of critics remains, and the world needs them to keep a balance in its view of AI as the use of AI becomes more entwined with everyday life. They include Judea Pearl, whose Book of Why reminds AI practitioners of the need for causal reasoning; and University of Toronto professor Hector Levesque, whose test for common sense, the Winograd Schema Challenge, sets a high bar for conventional AI. But none have been more prolific in the modern era in the critique of AI than NYU professor of psychology Gary Marcus. In five books and numerous articles in popular publications such as The New York Times and The New Yorker, Marcus has skewered the latest AI headlines, to remind people of the limits to present AI.

"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." Every CEO should read it, and everyone else at the company, too.