Amir Husain and The Sentient Machine.

Amir Husain and I have never met. We have known each other for a while, cross posted blogs, exchanged emails, wishes, greetings and condolences,. Last night I finally picked up my copy of The Sentient Machine, Amir's treatise on AI for people like me who are so out of touch with technology that we have to be fed with a very large and patient spoon. 

TL;DR; Two words. Buy it.

It was like we had finally gotten together after all these years. Our plans of being in the same time zone finally realized because Amir penned down his thoughts. A pleasant conversation between friends who have met after decades. 

I had been looking for a book for Amin, our college bound eldest, to get him to see the context behind Artificial Intelligence just like we had done with UX/UI and more recently with game design. If you are a high school, college and university professor who is trying to get his students to gently break into AI with scaring them off with vector mathematics, statistical analysis or R, the Sentient Machine should be recommended reading for your class. The book has no math just context. And relevant context at that.  Context that you should use to pick and build course and final year projects.

While I have to take up a few issues with Amir on points that we disagree, pick up a copy of the book. I strongly recommend it. I finished it in two readings. Only because I stayed late way past my bed time reading it. After ages I found a non-fiction text, that too by a friend, that I could sit out and read under the morning breeze with my rare cup of coffee in Karachi. 

With Amir's help I can now talk sensibly about the subject without letting on that once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, I too worked with back propagation and figuring out a way to forecast market prices with it. 

Don't wait, order your copy now at https://goo.gl/465DVR.