A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence

Michael Wooldridge’s A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence is an exciting romp through the history of this groundbreaking field–a one-stop-shop for AI’s past, present, and world-changing future.

The somewhat ill-defined long-term aim of AI is to build machines that are conscious, self-aware, and sentient; machines capable of the kind of intelligent autonomous action that currently only people are capable of. As an AI researcher with 25 years of experience, Oxford professor Mike Wooldridge has learned to be obsessively cautious about such claims, while still promoting an intense optimism about the future of the field. There have been genuine scientific breakthroughs that have made AI systems possible in the past decade that the founders of the field would have hailed as miraculous.  While the dream of conscious machines remains, Professor Wooldridge believes, a distant prospect, the floodgates for AI have opened.