What to Read About Artificial Intelligence?

The insidious coronavirus has confined us to our homes or cottages. The silver lining is that many people have more time to read. What books would I recommend to those interested in artificial intelligence? Today, I will introduce you to three books that I am currently reading. If you have read them or plan to, I would appreciate your comments.

1. Life 3.0 – I listened to this as an audiobook a few years ago, a birthday gift from the Alphas. The book was so brilliant that I also bought the Czech translation, which was published in 2020 by Argo / Dokořán. This book by Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark playfully explores the impact of AI on human civilisation. According to the author, this new form of artificial life will gain the ability to improve itself (perhaps it all started with my digital Descartes:)). The author considers various scenarios, as well as the ethical and philosophical implications. Like me, he questions how consciousness can even be defined.

2. Superpowers in Artificial Intelligence – China, Silicon Valley, and the new world order. I also read this years ago in English, and this year it was released in Czech. The book reflects on the fact that in AI, major innovations and brilliant AI experts are no longer as decisive as access to vast amounts of data. Lee Kai-Fu sees essentially only two significant players in the game: the USA and China. At the end, the author predicts that the greatest challenge of the future will not be the takeover of human jobs by artificial intelligence, but rather the question of what it truly means to be human. Personally, I was captivated by the author's experiences from both American and Chinese startups.

3. Deep Learning Approaches to Text Production – published at the end of March this year, currently only in English. This book may not appeal to as wide a range of readers as the first two, but it will be greatly appreciated by NLP experts. Thanks to this book, I understood why the over-trained xSum architecture is so much better than CNN, yet does not perform well on longer summaries. I look forward to gaining a quick overview of modern approaches to paraphrasing, sentence merging, and also text simplification (which two clients have already asked me about). The book also addresses other issues I am currently dealing with, such as how to account for context when generating text. I am particularly excited about the chapter on "REINFORCEMENT LEARNING APPLICATIONS," as I have not seen much on this topic in the context of text generation. Unfortunately, the complexity here is rather high, making it primarily suitable for postgraduate students or established researchers.

Sources:
• https://argo.cz/?post_type=book&p=131976
• https://www.knizniklub.cz/…/447846-supervelmoci-v-oblasti-u…
• https://books.google.cz/…/Deep_Learning_Approaches_to_Text_…