AI PERSPECTIVES

Welcome! This site brings together several resources intended to help you learn about Artificial Intelligence. Discover two books and a blog about AI by Dr. Steven Shwartz.

Online eBook
HOW AI WORKS

Over 400 pages of texbook-style in-depth information about how AI works

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has blasted its way into the public consciousness. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT understand language.  Google Translate helps us understand foreign language web pages and talk to Uber drivers in foreign countries. Speech recognition is built into many apps. Personal assistants like Siri and Alexa are used daily to help us complete simple tasks. E-commerce systems provide personalized recommendations, and face recognition apps automatically label our photos. AI systems are beating expert game players at complex games like Go and Texas Hold ‘Em. Factory robots are moving beyond repetitive motions and starting to stock shelves. On the more sinister side, deepfakes and fake news threaten our elections.

This online textbook explains how artificial intelligence works without the difficult mathematics that are found in many AI textbooks.

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book cover for evil robots, killer computers, and other myths

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Siri and Alexa, self-driving cars, and Google Translate, all help make our day-to-day lives easier. Still, mainly due to scenarios imagined in science fiction, many people fear that AI will one day develop to the point that robots will take all our jobs, or worse, take over the world.

This book explains in simple terms how AI technology works and why we will never see truly intelligent robots. After reading this book, you will understand the inner workings of today’s amazing AI technologies, including facial recognition, self-driving cars, machine translation, chatbots, deepfakes, and many others.

Though we don’t need to worry about intelligent computers taking over the world, AI advances do pose some very real threats to our society and this book identifies the crucial areas where we will need to adopt new laws and policies in order to preserve our safety and personal freedoms.

Read Chapter Summaries

From Forbes.com:  “Shwartz points out that many people are concerned that intelligent robots will be able to read manuals, take courses, and eliminate all our jobs. Fortunately, this is science fiction.”

From Kirkus Reviews:  “Despite his subject’s forbidding technicality, Shwartz writes with unwavering clarity in a book that will be accessible to a wide audience.  A thoughtfully cautious appraisal of AI and its promise.”

From Midwest Book Review:  “…should be required reading as a basic primer for any science and technology student interested in AI development and history.”

Silver Medal Winner / 2022 Axiom Book Awards / Emerging Trends and AI

Photo of author steven shwartzPhoto by Karissa Van Tassel Photography

STEVE SHWARTZ
About The Author

Steve received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in Cognitive Science where he began his AI research and also taught Statistics at Towson State University.  After receiving his PhD in 1979, AI pioneer Roger Schank invited Steve to join the Yale University faculty as a postdoctoral researcher in Computer Science.  In 1981, Roger asked Steve to help him start one of the first AI companies, Cognitive Systems, which progressed to a public offering in 1986.  Steve then started Esperant which produced one of the leading Business Intelligence products of the 1990s.  During the 1980s, Steve published 35 articles and a book on AI, spoke at many AI conferences, and received two commercial patents on AI.  As the AI Winter of the 1990s set in, Steve transitioned into a career as a successful serial software entrepreneur and investor and created several companies that were either acquired or had a public offering.  He tries to use his unique perspective as an early AI researcher and statistician to both explain how AI works in simple terms, to explain why people shouldn’t worry about intelligent robots taking over the world, and to explain the steps we need to take as a society to minimize the negative impacts of AI and maximize the positive impacts.

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