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Ladybird Expert #9
Artificial Intelligence
Part of the new Ladybird Expert series, Artificial Intelligence is a clear, simple and entertaining introduction to intelligent machines and the humans that program them.
Written by computer scientist Michael Wooldridge, Artificial Intelligence chronicles the development of intelligent machines, from Turing's dream of machines that think, to today's digital assistants like Siri and Alexa.
AI is not something that awaits us in the future. Inside you'll learn how wehave come to rely on embedded AI software and what a world of ubiquitous AI might look like.
For an adult readership, the Ladybird Expert series is produced in the same iconic small hardback format pioneered by the original Ladybirds. Each beautifully illustrated book features the first new illustrations produced in the original Ladybird style for nearly forty years.
Written by computer scientist Michael Wooldridge, Artificial Intelligence chronicles the development of intelligent machines, from Turing's dream of machines that think, to today's digital assistants like Siri and Alexa.
AI is not something that awaits us in the future. Inside you'll learn how wehave come to rely on embedded AI software and what a world of ubiquitous AI might look like.
For an adult readership, the Ladybird Expert series is produced in the same iconic small hardback format pioneered by the original Ladybirds. Each beautifully illustrated book features the first new illustrations produced in the original Ladybird style for nearly forty years.
56 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2018
27 people are currently reading
124 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 13, 2018
As a starting point in assessing this book it's essential to know the cultural background of Ladybird books in the UK. These were a series of cheap, highly illustrated, very thin hardbacks for children, ranging from storybooks to educational non-fiction. They had become very old-fashioned, until new owners Penguin brought back the format with a series of ironic humorous books for adults, inspired by the idea created by the artist Miriam Elia. Now, the 'Ladybird Expert' series are taking on serious non-fiction topics for an adult audience.
Michael Wooldridge takes us on an effective little tour of artificial intelligence. Given the very compact form, he fits a lot in, taking us through some of the historical development including the 'golden age' (when everything seemed possible and very little was done), through the rise and fall of expert system, robotics, and the modern split between machine learning and 'good old-fashioned AI'. He emphasises how much in the past expectations have far outreached reality (then does something rather similar himself at the end).
It's just such a shame the format wastes half the space available with pointless and rather childish illustrations that don't add anything at all to the content. This book is supposed to be aimed at adults, but I read this on a train (the format's ideal for a short journey), and felt embarrassed to be seen looking at what appears to be a children's picture book.
The format isn't helped by the problem of using an academic to put something across to the general reader - there was sometimes a lack of appreciation of the sort of questions that people would want answering. For example, there is a page dedicated to the program SHRDLU. Immediately the reader thinks ‘Why SHRDLU?’ And Wooldridge leaves us hanging with the unhelpful ‘curiously named’. (As I couldn’t be so cruel, it’s the second block of letters on a Linotype printing machine, where the first block, in approximate frequency of use order was ETAOIN.)
Occasionally, the tightness of space of the format led to an oversimplification that was confusing. So, for example, when talking about the travelling salesman problem, we are told: ‘The best we seem able to do with NP-complete problems [never properly defined] is to exhaustively consider all possible solutions.’ But it depends what you mean by best. That's the only way to be sure of finding the optimal solution, but there are methods that will get within a small percentage of optimal in practical times (or satnavs wouldn’t work), which are surely better than a non-feasible approach? Similarly, we are told ‘The type of logic used in mathematics can’t cope with this seemingly trivial scenario [moving away from the idea Tweetie, who is a bird, can fly when you discover it’s a penguin], because it wasn’t designed for retracting conclusions.’ But this is exactly what happens when using Bayesian methods... which bizarrely are covered on the next page.
A final, and important oversimplification is over the negatives of AI. Some parts ignore this. The section on driverless cars is upbeat about all the lives that could potentially be saved. But this ignores the psychological issue that we aren't good at weighing up virtual lives saved against the actual people who will definitely be killed by driverless cars (the first example occurred just before this review was written). Though Wooldridge does mention problems from job losses, loss of privacy and algorithmic bias, he also misses the negatives arising from a point he makes earlier that machine learning can’t explain its decisions. The inability to explain why, say, someone is refused a mortgage runs counter to increasing move towards corporate transparency and could prove a real problem.
Overall, Wooldridge does a surprisingly good job, though, given the limitations of the format.
Michael Wooldridge takes us on an effective little tour of artificial intelligence. Given the very compact form, he fits a lot in, taking us through some of the historical development including the 'golden age' (when everything seemed possible and very little was done), through the rise and fall of expert system, robotics, and the modern split between machine learning and 'good old-fashioned AI'. He emphasises how much in the past expectations have far outreached reality (then does something rather similar himself at the end).
It's just such a shame the format wastes half the space available with pointless and rather childish illustrations that don't add anything at all to the content. This book is supposed to be aimed at adults, but I read this on a train (the format's ideal for a short journey), and felt embarrassed to be seen looking at what appears to be a children's picture book.
The format isn't helped by the problem of using an academic to put something across to the general reader - there was sometimes a lack of appreciation of the sort of questions that people would want answering. For example, there is a page dedicated to the program SHRDLU. Immediately the reader thinks ‘Why SHRDLU?’ And Wooldridge leaves us hanging with the unhelpful ‘curiously named’. (As I couldn’t be so cruel, it’s the second block of letters on a Linotype printing machine, where the first block, in approximate frequency of use order was ETAOIN.)
Occasionally, the tightness of space of the format led to an oversimplification that was confusing. So, for example, when talking about the travelling salesman problem, we are told: ‘The best we seem able to do with NP-complete problems [never properly defined] is to exhaustively consider all possible solutions.’ But it depends what you mean by best. That's the only way to be sure of finding the optimal solution, but there are methods that will get within a small percentage of optimal in practical times (or satnavs wouldn’t work), which are surely better than a non-feasible approach? Similarly, we are told ‘The type of logic used in mathematics can’t cope with this seemingly trivial scenario [moving away from the idea Tweetie, who is a bird, can fly when you discover it’s a penguin], because it wasn’t designed for retracting conclusions.’ But this is exactly what happens when using Bayesian methods... which bizarrely are covered on the next page.
A final, and important oversimplification is over the negatives of AI. Some parts ignore this. The section on driverless cars is upbeat about all the lives that could potentially be saved. But this ignores the psychological issue that we aren't good at weighing up virtual lives saved against the actual people who will definitely be killed by driverless cars (the first example occurred just before this review was written). Though Wooldridge does mention problems from job losses, loss of privacy and algorithmic bias, he also misses the negatives arising from a point he makes earlier that machine learning can’t explain its decisions. The inability to explain why, say, someone is refused a mortgage runs counter to increasing move towards corporate transparency and could prove a real problem.
Overall, Wooldridge does a surprisingly good job, though, given the limitations of the format.
December 15, 2023
Yes, it’s here, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machines that are capable of simulating human intelligence in many areas.
So why am I recommending this book?
This has been an excellent introduction to AI. It is concise and explains so many of the terms we hear around us every day but don’t quite know what they mean and how they are connected.
I am doing a short AI course at Oxford University, after decades of finishing my university days, because I wanted and needed to know more about how AI will change the workplace, my job, and our lives in general. This was a great start, and in many ways simplifies and de-mystifies the terms and concepts of AI. Of course, it has technical phrases and terminology, but they are the ones we need to know about because AI is going nowhere.
The book takes us through the history, terminology, and where we are in the AI revolution and is written in a style anyone can relate to. So as an introduction it is excellent.
We referenced this book in the early stages of the course, and so I bought a copy for my husband because I do think it’s the most concise and one of the best at explaining what can otherwise come across as quite complicated.
Highly recommended at just 56 pages. It’s probably all you need to understand the basic terms and concepts, unless you are building these machine learning systems, in which case there are other more detailed sources.
A question remains? Can AI learn to review books? Of course not. All you have to do is look at how differently we all review and the difference in our personal experience with a book. A machine can’t feel or do emotion despite what you are hearing.
However, when it’s auto filling sentences and recommending books based on our browsing and reading history then that’s AI and being put to good use.
So why am I recommending this book?
This has been an excellent introduction to AI. It is concise and explains so many of the terms we hear around us every day but don’t quite know what they mean and how they are connected.
I am doing a short AI course at Oxford University, after decades of finishing my university days, because I wanted and needed to know more about how AI will change the workplace, my job, and our lives in general. This was a great start, and in many ways simplifies and de-mystifies the terms and concepts of AI. Of course, it has technical phrases and terminology, but they are the ones we need to know about because AI is going nowhere.
The book takes us through the history, terminology, and where we are in the AI revolution and is written in a style anyone can relate to. So as an introduction it is excellent.
We referenced this book in the early stages of the course, and so I bought a copy for my husband because I do think it’s the most concise and one of the best at explaining what can otherwise come across as quite complicated.
Highly recommended at just 56 pages. It’s probably all you need to understand the basic terms and concepts, unless you are building these machine learning systems, in which case there are other more detailed sources.
A question remains? Can AI learn to review books? Of course not. All you have to do is look at how differently we all review and the difference in our personal experience with a book. A machine can’t feel or do emotion despite what you are hearing.
However, when it’s auto filling sentences and recommending books based on our browsing and reading history then that’s AI and being put to good use.
March 27, 2022
This tiny Ladybird Expert Book does a pretty good job providing a quick introduction to the people, studies, achievements and failure of the first Golden Age of AI between 1950 to 1970, and its subsequent AI Winter that lasted a decade till the new era of Modern AI was born in 2005 after the second attempt at a Grand Challenge by DARPA to create an automous vehicle that can drive itself acorss 130 miles of Nevada Desert saw 5 finalists (out of 195 entries). The success of that competition is still bearing fruit today...
You can read the whole book in a single sitting, and still have time to admire the beautiful artwork by Stephen Player throughout the book.
You can read the whole book in a single sitting, and still have time to admire the beautiful artwork by Stephen Player throughout the book.
November 13, 2025
This Ladybird Expert book starts off 'simply' with the historic foundations and thinking behind AI, through the 1930s-70s, moving gradually into the modern 'complex' era, through expert systems, neural networks to machine-learning, and our everyday experiences with Alexa, GPS, Google Translate, although I'm not sure it quite reaches the realms of ChatGPT and image generation, which are also becoming everyday experiences. As such, this book is very interesting to the computer-history geeks among us, and even the philosophers, but in the space of hardly any time at all, it's already becoming dated. 4.5/5
August 29, 2018
At first I thought it was a child’s book, but a quick flip through it confirmed that it was definitely aimed at adults. It is a really short, concise overview of AI and its history. So short that I think I read it all in much less than an hour. But the information contained is really good. If you want an easy, but not dumbed-down, introduction to the history of AI, give this a read.
April 18, 2022
This is a very good summary of the author’s book “the road to conscious machines” which is a quite comprehensive and educational history book for computational advancements of people. This one has bold illustrations which kind of helps you to understand the complexity as though it is a children book for adults :)
April 22, 2020
Quick coffee break read - makes a nice little intro to AI for the non-expert. Simple fun explanations in simple language. (I'm not an non-expert, but I was curious to see how the subject was discussed). Disclaimer: the author is a friend / colleague :-)
May 14, 2020
I enjoyed it.
it starts with a little history of AI (highlights)
it covers a lot of information in this little book
loved the illustrations as well :)
it starts with a little history of AI (highlights)
it covers a lot of information in this little book
loved the illustrations as well :)
October 30, 2021
A really very short and crisp introduction to most of the key ideas in the story of evolution of the field of artificial intelligence
March 4, 2023
Such a concise history of AI and introduction to intelligent machines. Just an hour's read.
January 7, 2024
Excellent little lunch time pocket read, I found it insightful and there are further reading recommendations in back if you want to devel deeper
April 19, 2024
Good starting point for a quick introduction on AI
July 19, 2019
An enjoyable and quick overview of AI that outlines the the key principles in an accessible way.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews