The Routledge Social Science Handbook of AI

"As expected from a handbook with the goal of summarizing current debates, questions are posed and controversies noted more often than answers are offered in this collection of 21 essays. However, surveying so many different angles on artificial intelligence (AI) allows some insight-inducing themes to emerge. AI and machine learning (ML) are everywhere, from a cellphone's virtual assistant to tech support chatbots, including in the machines that decipher handwritten addresses for the US Postal Service. Many AI systems are assisted by small armies of humans who fill in when the software fails. Such technology remains invisible to most people yet shapes their understandings of the world and themselves. People think and categorize, work, play, and govern themselves differently because of AI-they adopt algorithmic thinking, see new value in inferential reasoning because of big data, and treat anthropomorphic robots like persons. Sometimes these changes are obvious or can be articulated, but some seem to influence human experience and expectations of the world itself, as in the debatable but widespread idea that minds are computers, and computers are (so far fairly limited) minds. Many will use this book, though specialists are likely to be most interested. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. General readers."

Matthew J. Moore, Professor of Political Science, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, USA