Thinking AI: How Artificial Intelligence Emulates Human Understanding

“Can machines think?” Ever since Alan Turing posed this question in an influential 1950 paper, it has been central to research in artificial intelligence. More than seventy-five years after Turing’s paper, we grapple with it every time we wonder if Watson was actually smarter than Jeopardy! champions, or if ChatGPT really knows what it’s talking about. In Thinking AI, computer scientist John MacCormick explores Turing’s question from a perspective informed by a detailed understanding of the way modern AI systems work. MacCormick explains, in accessible fashion, the ideas behind the two main pillars of the twenty-first century AI revolution: deep neural networks and reinforcement learning.