HACKER Q&A
📣 mishkovski

Best Books about AI


What are the best books about practical AI? What are the best books for people in AI leadership positions?


  👤 hungrigekatze Accepted Answer ✓
It's not a book but I really like the Elements of AI two-part course series that the University of Helskini provided (financial) support for: the two courses in the Elements of AI series consist of a pure theory course and the second course is a hands-on / applied course. Because not everyone who is seeking to learn about AI has programming skills the second course is a 'choose your own adventure' type course, with one track involving lots of programming, one 'middle of the road' option with just a touch of coding, and the other track not involving any programming whatsoever (suitable for executives, IMO).

https://www.elementsofai.com/

I've recommended this course (just the first one if you're a time-constrained executive) to C-suite colleagues in the past who wanted to become more informed about ML, DL and AI, but who didn't want a deeply technical explanation a la Andrew Ng's Coursera courses or similar content.

The Elements of AI courses touch upon the statistical underpinnings of the space (there's a unit on Bayes' Theorem), the societal implications of automated decision-making process (job creation, etc.), what tasks are "doable with AI today" and which tasks are definitely _not_ doable with A(G)I, etc.

Helping non-technical folks develop an intuition about what is possible with "AI" is crucial, I think, to having a workplace and a society that can talk realistically about the benefits and detriments of robotic data processing such as ML, DL, AI.


👤 chrisa
"Real World AI" by Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang is the best book I've read on AI for people in leadership positions - it gets just enough in the weeds to really explain what's going on while still staying high level enough to address things that managers/executives would want to know. It also has several real world case studies that show both the promise and the risk of AI

👤 menshiki
I have personally enjoyed the "AI for Everything" series published by Routledge.