The five best books to understand AI

IN RECENT years artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a revolution. After decades of modest progress that never quite lived up to its promise, a different approach—relying on big data and stats, not clever algorithms—made huge strides in solving real-world problems like voice- and image-recognition and self-driving cars. Also in the past ten years, a lot of books have been published that aim to explain what AI is, where it’s going and why it matters. Books by AI academics do well at explaining the technology but are less robust at foreseeing the implications. For that, bright lights from outside the AI world do better. Five books in particular stand out.