eopardy! players. And the fastest growing job title in America? AI specialist.

13 Recommended AI Books

The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Jenelle Shane
Inspired by Marty Cagan
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps by Nicole Forsgren, Jez
Humble and Gene Kim
Technically Wrong by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Rebooting AI by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis
Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville
Interpretable Machine Learning by Christoph Molar
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
AI for People and Business by Alex Castrounis
The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book by Andriy Burkov
Machine Learning Yearning by Andrew Ng
Neural Networks and Deep Learning by Michael Nielson

That degree of ubiquity — not to mention AI’s potential to upend the future of work
— means even tech agnostics would benefit from at least a working knowledge of its
concepts. At the same time, AI’s ever-growing complexity means practitioners need
to know the wheat from the chaff when it comes to practical application how-to’s.

To that end, we asked three AI experts to pick some of their favorite books about
artificial intelligence. The panel includes:

jana eggers ai booksJana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, a machine-learning-powered

recommendation engine

garrett smith ai booksGarrett Smith, founder of Guild AI, an open-source machine-

learning engineering platform

alex castrounis ai booksAlex Castrounis, an AI consultant and author of AI for

People and Business: A Framework for Better Human Experiences and Business Success

Their selections range from a highly technical consideration of AI’s so-called

black box problem to a historical overview of machine learning; from a sober
counterpoint to the field’s deep-learning fixation to a thoughtful critique of
algorithm bias.

JANA EGGERS
the master algorithm ai booksThe Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate
Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

This book provides a wider framework than just deep learning, which is the hot
thing now. Two things to bear in mind: People should know about the different
tribes, as the author calls them, and they should also understand that most
solutions are going to be ensemble systems, meaning it's not going to be one-tribe-
takes-all. It's going to be a combination of several.

You see that even with what DeepMind did with AlphaGo, which used two tribes,
arguably even three. So it's a good framework, and it's accessible. For technical
people, it's probably going to open their eyes to some things they didn't know
about, especially if they just got into AI in the latest craze. And it's also
accessible to business people, meaning it's not too technical that they feel like
they have to slog through it. It is a little more dry than my next pick, but will
give you a spoonful of sugar to go with the shredded wheat — and I like shredded
wheat, to be clear.
The author’s correct in that there are tribes and the tribes don't often mix, but I
think we need to encourage the tribes to mix more. I challenge with the whole
“master algorithm” [idea] because there's not going to be one. Like I said, it's
going to be an ensemble. Getting that across, and how to mix and match them [is
important]. But I do think it's a great initial framework.

you look like a thing and i love you ai booksYou Look Like a Thing and I Love You:
How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by
Jenelle Shane

It’s really complementary with The Master Algorithm. After you see the promise of
AI there — and I do believe in the promise — this kind of tells you, Okay, here’s
where we are. We're in a nascent state and we need to understand what that entails
— where it's strong and where it's not.

The book makes where AI is [in terms of evolution] more real. In my AI talks, I use
a lot of examples that come from Amazon, looking at the [curious] recommendations
you sometimes get for products and the challenges with that. I'm not picking on
Amazon; I chose it because it's something people can relate to.

And that's what Jenelle does; she makes AI relatable. So people understand better
where the technology is and some of the challenges that we might be coming across.
Because people imagine AI as this beautiful, wonderful magic black box that's
smarter than them — and it's not. Jenelle helps ground that for readers, so that
they're less scared of it and hopefully engage more with it. It’s a fun, easy read.

Related32 Artificial Intelligence Companies Building a Smarter Tomorrow

inspired ai booksInspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty

Cagan

It’s not specifically about AI, but rather about how to deliver technology. It's a
great book for everyone from engineers to executives to management. I've given this
book to all of them. Engineers have [read it and] been like, “I never understood
why it was so hard to work on my teams, and I've been part of the problem!” Or,
“I've hated our designer all this time, and now I understand them and what their
role is and what my role is!”

Cagan puts together a good framework for how to define and deliver products. The
focus is technical products, but it's good for products in general. You can read it
quickly. If you have a three-hour flight, you can skim it and still pick up a lot.
Marty's very smart and has been in the industry for a long time.

And it was a personal journey for him: He started out as an engineer himself and
was on a product that wasn't successful. And he thought, But I delivered exactly on
the MRD, or marketing requirements doc, so why did it fail? It's either them or
it's me. Who was it? It's a combination.

accelerate ai booksAccelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building

and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble
and Gene Kim
If Inspired is about how to define the best product as a team, this is about how to
deliver it. It's really the DevOps equivalent of product definition. Once you get
to the right product, how do you then continually deliver it? And that's especially
critical for AI, because you have more change streaming in from both data and the
algorithm.

Software development has gone from annual releases to continuous deployment. Not
everybody's there, but most people are somewhere on the spectrum. With AI, we have
to accelerate. Because not only are algorithms changing, but they then impact the
software and technology around them. And you have the data that impacts the AI.
Data models are constantly changing because the data is constantly changing. You’re
dealing with a much more complex ecosystem, so we really need to adopt those
principles. It’s really DevOps on steroids, right? Or chaotic DevOps.

That's why this book is especially important for AI. If Inspired is the foundation,
then Accelerate is what you really need to deliver AI. They complement each other —
and they're critical for AI because AI is more nebulous. We have to get these
definitions down and we have to get delivery down.
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technically wrong ai booksTechnically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and

Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

You need to understand bias and the problems we can create with these algorithms.
There are several good titles on this now, [including] Weapons of Math Destruction
and Algorithms of Oppression. I do think that Sara provides many different types of
examples that are particularly related to technology and what's happening with the
digital transformation, which is where a lot of AI is coming in.

With some bias, the problem is the data has the bias built in. Even if you're not
putting the explicit tags of bias — gender, race, things like that — there's so
much [that’s] built in and been reinforced because of what the human bias thinks
already.

AI will pick up on our generalizations. That's where we need to be careful about

what data we give it to learn on. How do we make sure that we're cognizant of
what's baked in, even when it's not explicit?

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