Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

A good primer to the field. Hits the right depth between technical and theoretical layers, including quite a bit on ethics.

My takeaway is that we’re really, really far away from anything approaching what we think artificial intelligence was going to be. The key is that there’s a difference between (1) a specific algorithm meant to do a single thing, and (2) “general AI” which is meant to approximate the expansiveness, majesty, and self-awareness of human thought. We’re pretty good on the former, but the latter might be a pipe dream.

Melanie Mitchell is a great author. She wrote another excellent book on complexity theory.