AIQ by Nick Polson and James Scott describes “How
People and Machines Are Smarter Together” by providing a useful overview of
Artificial Intelligence and associated concepts. In fact, the authors
acknowledge that AI technologies bring “immense benefits” along with
some “dangers to watch out for,” promising that the book “will show you what
you need to understand if you want to play an informed role” in the discussion
of future policy on AI.
And, indeed, what makes this book AIQ so
compelling is the ease with which key ideas are explained. There are only 7
chapters and each is devoted to a person who made a significant contribution to
AI. For example, “The Refugee” focuses
on a Hungarian-American named Abraham Wald who invented sequential sampling and
worked in the 1930s and 40s with other mathematical geniuses like Milton
Friedman and George Stigler. Wald helped save the lives of Allied fighter
pilots and their crews during WWII by devising personalized survivability recommendations
for the aircraft. Authors Polson and Scott point out the similarities to present
day personalized recommendations from services like Netflix. Significantly, they note that “the key
algorithms of the future are about suggestions, not search.”
Throughout other chapters, Polson and Scott provide a varied
set of examples and point to the presence of four trends driving the current
explosion in demand and capacity for using AI to solve problems. These trends are faster chips, massive data
sets (some of the figures will astound you!), cloud computing (meaning lower
overhead costs) and good ideas! Polson and Scott further note that pretty
much every AI system (including their examples of electric cars, cucumber sorters and credit card
fraud monitors) follow the same ‘pipeline of algorithms’ template where “the
pipeline takes in data from some specific domain, performs a chain of
calculations, and outputs a prediction or a decision.” I have already suggested
this book to students and look forward to seeing how excited they are as they grasp
simple explanations and better understand the history for seemingly sophisticated
tasks. Fascinating!
