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This is an excellent primer for the uninitiated about what artificial intelligence is, how it is being used and what implications it holds for the future of many fields and for humanity itself.

Toby Walsh is one of the world’s leading researchers on AI and is currently a professor in the field at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

He’s both sceptical about the money-driven hype around IA and alarmed at how willing people are to be deceived by its increasingly sophisticated applications.

His key point is that artificial intelligence, as the name suggests, is ARTIFICIAL and different to human intelligence. The clue is in the title of the book. It’s about faking intelligence. While these algorithms can perform amazing feats of computation they are nevertheless machines.

“Machine-learning algorithms typically require thousands of examples to recognise a single concept,� Walsh writes. “Humans, on the other hand, can learn from a single example. Machine learning transfers poorly outside the training set.�

“Narrow intelligence isn’t on a continuum to general intelligence. Success at playing world-class chess with AI didn’t provide us with any progress on AIs that might fold a shirt, understand a metaphor in a Shakespearian sonnet or discover a new antibiotic.�

In other words, Walsh is concerned about inflated expectations about what artificial intelligence can and can’t achieve. What’s missing from AI is simple common sense and while its supposed ‘creativity� in simulating art, design, music and literature is making collective jaws drop around the world, this is still fakery.

Essentially, without common sense, the sophisticated AIs that technology companies are building will remain, at best, idiot savants - superhuman at a few narrow tasks, but lacking in all-round general intelligence.

The worry, however, is that many of us are losing their ability to spot the difference. And that has potentially catastrophic consequences.

Highly recommended.