The Machine That Learns

About This Book

You typed a sentence into a box on a screen, and a machine answered like a person. In that small vertigo lies the story of our age. The Machine That Learns is the gripping, human, and astonishingly clear account of artificial intelligence — how it works, where it came from, what it can and cannot do, and where it might be taking us.

From Alan Turing's haunting question in 1950, through the golden ages and bitter “winters” of a field that failed twice before it triumphed, to the deep-learning big bang, the transformer, and the language models that put a conversational intelligence into the hands of hundreds of millions — E.B Cohen weaves the saga, the science, and the stakes into a single narrative for the curious reader. Here are the people and the rivalries, the neurons and the scaling laws explained from first principles, the jobs and the bias and the deepfakes, the alignment problem and the race between superpowers, and the biggest question of all: whether these machines are on the road to a general intelligence that could match or exceed our own — and what that would mean.

Neither breathless hype nor easy doom, this is the one book for anyone who has used one of these systems and wanted, finally, to understand what is really happening — and to think clearly about the most powerful, most argued-over, and most consequential technology of the century.