A concise and illuminating history of the field of artificial intelligence from one of its earliest and most respected pioneers.

AI & I is an intellectual history of the field of artificial intelligence from the perspective of one of its first practitioners Eugene Charniak. Charniak entered the field in 1967, roughly 12 years after AI’s founding, and was involved in many of AI’s formative milestones. In this book, he traces the trajectory of breakthroughs and disappointments of the discipline up to the current day, clearly and engagingly demystifying this oft revered and misunderstood technology. His argument is controversial, but well-supported: that classical AI has been almost uniformly unsuccessful and that the modern, deep learning approach should be viewed as the foundation for all the exciting developments that are to come.

Written for the scientifically educated layperson, this book chronicles the history of the field of AI, starting with its origin, in 1956, as a topic for a small academic workshop held at Dartmouth University. From there, the author covers reasoning and knowledge representation; reasoning under uncertainty; chess; computer vision; speech recognition; language acquisition; deep learning; and learning writ large. Ultimately, Charniak takes issue with the controversy of AI—the fear that its invention means the end of jobs, creativity, and potentially even humans as a species—and explains why such concerns are unfounded. Instead, he believes that we should embrace the technology and all its potential to benefit society.

Eugene Charniak was a professor of computer science and cognitive science at Brown University. His primary research area was language processing, particularly in the context of probabilistic and deep learning models. He passed away in July 2023.