Top 7 Books in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

The recent explosion of interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning has led to writing many books about these subjects. 

1. Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems by Aurélien Géron

Through a series of recent breakthroughs, deep learning has boosted the entire field of machine learning. Now, even programmers who know close to nothing about this technology can use simple, efficient tools to implement programs capable of learning from data. This practical book shows you how.

By using concrete examples, minimal theory, and two production-ready Python frameworks—scikit-learn and TensorFlow—author Aurélien Géron helps you gain an intuitive understanding of the concepts and tools for building intelligent systems. You’ll learn a range of techniques, starting with simple linear regression and progressing to deep neural networks. With exercises in each chapter to help you apply what you’ve learned, all you need is programming experience to get started.

  • Explore the machine learning landscape, particularly neural nets
  • Use scikit-learn to track an example machine-learning project end-to-end
  • Explore several training models, including support vector machines, decision trees, random forests, and ensemble methods
  • Use the TensorFlow library to build and train neural nets
  • Dive into neural net architectures, including convolutional nets, recurrent nets, and deep reinforcement learning
  • Learn techniques for training and scaling deep neural nets
  • Apply practical code examples without acquiring excessive machine learning theory or algorithm details

2. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark 

How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who’s helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today’s kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle?

What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn’t shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues—from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.

3. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies 1st Edition, Kindle Edition by Nick Bostrom 

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains.

If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.

But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?

To get closer to an answer to this question, we must make our way through a fascinating landscape of topics and considerations. Read the book and learn about oracles, genies, singletons; about boxing methods, tripwires, and mind crime; about humanity’s cosmic endowment and differential technological development; indirect normativity, instrumental convergence, whole brain emulation and technology couplings; Malthusian economics and dystopian evolution; artificial intelligence, and biological cognitive enhancement, and collective intelligence.

This profoundly ambitious and original book picks its way carefully through a vast tract of forbiddingly difficult intellectual terrain. Yet the writing is so lucid that it somehow makes it all seem easy. After an utterly engrossing journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life, we find in Nick Bostrom’s work nothing less than a reconceptualization of the essential task of our time.

4. An Introduction to Statistical Learning: with Applications in R (Springer Texts in Statistics) 1st ed. 2013, Corr. 7th printing 2017 Edition by Gareth James 

An Introduction to Statistical Learning provides an accessible overview of the field of statistical learning, an essential toolset for making sense of the vast and complex data sets that have emerged in fields ranging from biology to finance to marketing to astrophysics in the past twenty years. This book presents some of the most important modeling and prediction techniques, along with relevant applications. Topics include linear regression, classification, resampling methods, shrinkage approaches, tree-based methods, support vector machines, clustering, and more. Color graphics and real-world examples are used to illustrate the methods presented. Since the goal of this textbook is to facilitate the use of these statistical learning techniques by practitioners in science, industry, and other fields, each chapter contains a tutorial on implementing the analyses and methods presented in R, an extremely popular open source statistical software platform.Two of the authors co-wrote The Elements of Statistical Learning (Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, 2nd edition 2009), a popular reference book for statistics and machine learning researchers. 

An Introduction to Statistical Learning covers many of the same topics, but at a level accessible to a much broader audience. This book is targeted at statisticians and non-statisticians alike who wish to use cutting-edge statistical learning techniques to analyze their data. The text assumes only a previous course in linear regression and no knowledge of matrix algebra.5. Deep Learning with Python 1st Edition by Francois CholletDeep Learning with Python introduces the field of deep learning using the Python language and the powerful Keras library. Written by Keras creator and Google AI researcher François Chollet, this book builds your understanding through intuitive explanations and practical examples.

5. Deep Learning with Python 1st Edition by Francois Chollet

Deep Learning with Python introduces the field of deep learning using the Python language and the powerful Keras library. Written by Keras creator and Google AI researcher François Chollet, this book builds your understanding through intuitive explanations and practical examples.

6. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) by Stuart Russell,‎ Peter Norvig  

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 3e offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence. Number one in its field, this textbook is ideal for one or two-semester, undergraduate or graduate-level courses in Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Peter Norvig, contributing Artificial Intelligence author and Professor Sebastian Thrun, a Pearson author are offering a free online course at Stanford University on artificial intelligence. 

According to an article in The New York Times , the course on artificial intelligence is “one of three being offered experimentally by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills beyond this elite campus to the entire world.” One of the other two courses, an introduction to database software, is being taught by Pearson author Dr. Jennifer Widom

7. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil  

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil examines the next step in the evolutionary process of the union of human and machine. He foresees the dawning of a new civilization where we will be able to transcend our biological skills with the vastly greater capacity, speed and knowledge-sharing abilities of our creations. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped and world hunger and poverty will be solved. There will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. The Singularity is Near offers a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

Source: https://www.amazon.com/

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2 thoughts on “Top 7 Books in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

  1. Once we have developed super intelligence, there are three possibilities: (A) either it’s trying to destroy us. (B) It doesn’t try to destroy us. (C) It neither tries to destroy us nor not to destroy us (it is then indifferent). If it is a binary-based superintelligence, (A) is quite possible. If it is one that works on the basis of natural language with numerical truth values as a universal method (my version) and is an oracle super intelligence, then probably (B) occurs. If it works on the basis of brain emulation and is without a body, there is a residual risk because of its problematic emotional world. But experience shows that the more educated people or societies are on average, the less violent they become.
    😉

  2. I’ve read almost all of these and I thought Tegmarks book was the best. The first chapter alone on a hypothetical of how AI would develop and take over was fantastic. His previous book was maybe even better.

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