Great value. Super interesting and accessible.

I’m an AI enthusiast about to begin a CS and AI degree. I found this to be a great listen over a series of long car drives.

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Read this before following the mainstream narrative

While this is a few years on, learning from the titans of AI gives important perspectives on current the technology, how it has been developed, where it’s going and what opportunities to pay attention to while weighing the risks. A recommended read to those practicing ‘intellectual self-defense' before allowing the mainstream narrative to influence your decision.

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Still timely, 5-6 years on

Tech books often go out of date fast. Given the excitement around ChatGPT over the last year, it's easy to assume there's been such a massive leap forward that books on AI from a few years ago will be obsolete by now.

This book, though, is more about the big picture theory (including questions about what intelligence even is) than the specifics, from active practitioners in the field with decades of experience in the field. Many have been central to defining and developing what we think of as AI today.

That experience does, in this case, seem to equal wisdom. There's still excitement here, but tempered with realism. A common fairly amusing theme - given the interviewer/editor is the guy who wrote that alarmist Rise of the Robots book a few years back - is how most are relatively dismissive of questions about the risks of Artificial General Intelligence and an AI Apocalypse.

Of course the different interviewees are of varying interest, depending on personal preference - but combined and contrasted over the course of the whole book, this provides an excellent primer on understanding the history and state of the AI debate from a variety of highly informed perspectives. Worth a read/listen.

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ok book, great minds of ai, repetitive/wasteful

Important subject matter, some real luminaries, good insights but half this book is spent on 5 repeated questions that the author is excited about, rather than digging deep into the vast experience and passion of his interviewees. becomes wasteful and repetitive

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Foundational AI views

Those who were there in the very early days of AI explain much about the positives and negatives of the journey which is still nowhere near finished.

From five years before ChatGPT became our toy and was followed by a number of consumer grade glorified chatbots we can see that things have come a long way but big, big steps still need to be made to have AI serve a common good.

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Excellent for novices

AI has come onto my radar and luckily I picked this book. The interviews were enlightening and it helped me separate the issues that get conflated by the media

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A good book and a great effort by Martin Ford. As we’d expect, it has become a bit dated following the recent advances in AI.

Diverse range of views from AI pioneers and leaders. A bit dated now after the recent advances in AI.

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Provocative insights into the minds that have shaped modern AI

A series of insightful interviews with the gurus that have shaped AI that we now taken for granted.

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A collection of interviews

Right in the introduction, the author brags about how he picked interview subjects based on their gender. It's not only disrespectful to the readers, but also to the people you're interviewing. He does not tell us who was selected for this, so this puts everyone under the cloud of having been interviewed to satisfy the author's arbitrary quota. There is also a lot of harping on 'bias' in AI, which is assumed and never demonstrated.

The interview format is a bit awkward, because there are two people speaking. Every question is preceded with "Martin Ford" and every answer with the name of the interviewee. But once you get used to it, it's actually alright.

There are some very good interviews, but the work as a whole is not something that can be recommended.

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1 person found this helpful