Your AI Reading List for 2019

If you thought AI was over-hyped in 2018, just wait until you see what the rest of 2019 has in store. According to a couple of reports I've read recently 50% of businesses stated that they were integrating AI into their platforms over the next 2 years, even though 9 in 10 of their execs weren't exactly sure why?!?

Big data is also getting bigger, no one wants to share data with brands anymore, voice technologies are changing every thing, the number of connected (IoT) products in the world is growing at a rate of about 1M+ per hour and most social networks have stopped working the way that they used to. These, among many other issues that we don't have time to go into here, will be the reason that the next 5 years will probably be more disruptive than the last 20. And ALL of this will be impacted by artificial intelligence.

In my opinion.

So with that in mind, I thought it might be helpful to share a few of the best books I've read recently to help get you up to speed with AI, so that you can more confidently filter the truth and opportunity from the BS. I've included Amazon (non-affiliate) links to the hard copies. Although they are all available on iBooks and Audible, I personally find that the best way to learn this type of new stuff is to write in the columns, fold over the page corners and highlight all the best bits. "Carrying a real-book under your arm is the best status symbol you can wear", as Dame Vivienne Westwood said recently. I agree.

Finally, this is a short-ish list to keep it manageable, but please feel free to add your contributions in the comments for the benefit of anyone else who may be interested.

• Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark (2018)
• Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos (2017)
• Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2016)
• Hello World by Hannah Fry (2018)
• Only Humans Need Apply by Thomas Davenport & Julia Kirby (2016)
• Deep Thinking by Garry Kasparov (2017)
• The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross (2016)
• Heartificial Empathy by Minter Dial
• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig

Life 3.0 is written by Max Tegmark a professor from MIT. His book is a brilliant and recent publication about the impact that AI will have on society. I have given away boxes of this book at the dinners which I hosted in 2018. Master Algorithm was written by Pedro Domingos (a professor at the University of Washington and a researcher in machine intelligence) and along with Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence was named by Bill Gates as one of the two books you MUST read in order to understand AI. Hannah Fry is just a wonderful human and a Brian Cox type BBC TV presenter. She writes beautifully in a storytelling style for Hello World, while simplifying the complexity of AI and making it interesting for non-techies. (She's also ridiculously smart since her day job is working as a mathematics professor at University College London).

Only Humans Need Apply was required reading for all Harvard Business School students in 2016 and Deep Thinking is a work of genius by the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, who famously lost to IBM's Deep Blue computer back in 1997. Garry claimed (joked?) at the time IBM destroyed his life and the IBM win marked the tipping point towards machines becoming truly intelligent. (He also featured in an episode of my Ten Words podcast about "Good Humans & Machines" which makes him even more brilliant. In The Industries of the Future, Alec Ross (Whitehouse advisor on Innovation to Obama and Clinton) writes superbly about the impact AI will have on our society and in particular, jobs. In a similar vibe to Deep Thinking, my good friend Minter Dial wrote a wonderful book called Heartificial Empathy. Minter digs into the head and the heart of AI systems and the role that empathy has to play, as humans and machines seek to work together more intimately.

Rounding out my list is Russell and Norvig's EPIC 900-page+ Modern Approach to AI, which most AI/ML university professors will cite as THE manual for machine learning classes and the bible for any AI professional. Written in 1995 and updated for 2016, this is the gold standard of non-BS books on AI (but as you'd probably expect from a text book on AI, it's pretty heavy going). Let me know what books you have read, and drop them in the comments to inspire others.

Need more inspiration?

Want a job in AI but don't have the experience / qualifications?

>> You could do worse than take a Udacity 'Nano Degree' in AI

Want to make sure that you stay up-to-speed (because books date pretty quickly)?

>> Check out the AI Progress Forum from the highly respected and independent Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which cuts though the hype and tells you exactly which technologies are working and why (they also have good images to use in your presentations).

Fancy taking a FREE Masterclass from IBM? (They spent several billion dollars building Watson so they know a thing or two about AI).

>> Find out more about the bite-sized course here.

Want to see what I think about AI?

>> If you can put up with my dodgy Northern accent (!) I recorded this 2-hour lecture as an introduction to AI for a recent course I delivered.

Thanks for reading. If you manage to bag any of those titles, please report back and let us all know what you thought of them!