Acknowledgments

Our goal in this book has been to educate and to challenge, both to explain how AI and machine learning work and how they might be improved. To the extent that we have succeeded, we have been helped immeasurably by colleagues, friends, and family members, often with pressing deadlines of their own. Many, including Mark Achbar, Joey Davis, Annie Duke, Doug Hofstadter, Hector Levesque, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Vik Moharir, Steve Pinker, Philip Rubin, Harry Shearer, Manuela Veloso, Athena Vouloumanos, and Brad Wyble, were kind enough to read and comment on the entire manuscript. Others, including Uri Ascher, Rod Brooks, David Chalmers, Animesh Garg, Yuling Gu, and Cathy O’Neil, gave valuable comments on specific chapters.

We also thank a set of friends and colleagues—Karen Bakker, Leon Bottou, Kyunghyun Cho, Zack Lipton, Missy Cummings, Pedro Domingos, Ken Stanley, Sydney Levine, Omer Levy, Ben Schneiderman, Harry Shearer, and Andrew Sundstrom—for a steady stream of information and pointers. Harry, in particular, never stopped sending us intriguing links, several of which made it into the book.

Maayan Harel’s charming and witty drawings greatly enliven the book. We are also grateful to Michael Alcorn, Anish Athalye, Tom Brown, Kevin Eykholt, Kunihiko Fukushima, Gary Lupyan, Tyler Vigen, and Oriol Vinyals for their gracious permission to use pictures and artwork that they have created; and Steve Pinker and Doug Hofstadter for permission to quote at length from their writings.

We also thank our agent, Daniel Greenberg, who helped connect us with our editor, Edward Kastenmeier, and the team at Pantheon.

Four people especially stand out. Edward Kastenmeier suggested to us a framework that was hugely helpful in organizing the presentation of our arguments, in addition to providing a wealth of brilliant and insightful editing improvements. Steve Pinker, a source of inspiration to Gary for three decades, led us to rethink how we framed the whole book. Annie Duke, fresh from a return to cognitive science after a brief excursion into the world of poker championships, provided fantastic insights into how to better engage lay readers. And Athena Vouloumanos, as she so often has, played two roles, ever-supportive wife to Gary and near-professional editor, reading multiple drafts, every time finding dozens of subtle but powerful ways to radically improve our writing. We are both so very grateful to all.