Though I usually manage everything book-related on Goodreads.com, which is, by the way, a very good platform for doing it, due to the possibility of wider audience interest in Artificial Intelligence, I have decided to share my short review on “Architects of intelligence” book here.
The book contains interviews with the 23 most prominent research scientists and entrepreneurs in AI and Machine Learning (including ‘Fathers of Deep Learning’: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun), who made significant contributions to those fields through different dimensions.
Though interviews are fairly open-ended, the author tries to focus discussion around getting to know the opinions of these 23 individuals on questions such as:
- What are some of the most promising AI approaches and technologies and what breakthroughs in the field we might see in the near future?
- Path to Artificial General Intelligence
- Impact of AI on economy and employment
- The issue of bias in data and the possibility of regulations in AI research
- Development of fully autonomous weapons, the arms race between nations
- Soft topics such as how interviewed people in the book became interested in the field, their backgrounds, career trajectories, personal stories and future aspirations
Overall, I think, after reading the book, one gets a bigger picture of the AI field, its origin and development stages, as well as modern research areas and current, future pressing issues. I personally was not aware that pioneering AI research was not statistical, with concepts and applications such as symbolic AI and expert systems. Also, I got to know some interesting facts about those ‘top AI people’, such as Geoffrey Hinton starting his education in psychology, and working a year as a carpenter after graduate school.
Have a nice read 🙂