Michael Wooldridge 2021. The Road to Conscious Machines. The Story of AI. Pelican Books, 395 pp.

A short pragmatic antidote to Raymond Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom et al. The is no singularity nigh, mostly because that prediction is based on Moore’s Law and the advance of computing hardware. Instead the limitation to AI is software, which develops much more slowly. Short meaty chapters on the history of AI (especially Turing), modern approaches, older approaches (inc Prolog). Great short appendices including on Bayes’ Theorem, neural nets, further reading. Easily readable, good value and a great signal to noise ratio throughout.