Advanced Praise

Artificial intelligence is among the most consequential issues facing humanity, yet much of today’s commentary has been less than intelligent: awe-struck, credulous, apocalyptic, uncomprehending. Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, experts in human and machine intelligence, lucidly explain what today’s AI can and cannot do, and point the way to systems that are less A and more I.

Steven Pinker


Lucid and deeply informed, from a critical but sympathetic perspective

Noam Chomsky


When I was a child I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" and then read everything I could about A.I. All the smart people said it was 20 years away. Twenty years later I was an adult and the smart people said that A.I. was 20 years away. Twenty years after that we passed 2001 and the smart people said it was about 20 years away... Now is the time to listen to smarter people.

Penn Jillette


A must read for anyone who cares about the future of artificial intelligence, filled with masterful storytelling and clear and easy to digest examples.

Annie Duke


Finally, a book that tells us what AI is, what AI is not.

Garry Kasparov


Every tech CEO should read Rebooting AI and everyone else at the company, too.

Pedro Domingos



Two leaders in the field offer a compelling analysis of the current state of the art 

and reveal the steps we must take to achieve a truly robust artificial intelligence.

Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. Professors Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis have spent their careers at the forefront of AI research and have witnessed some of the greatest milestones in the field, but they argue that a computer beating a human in Jeopardy does not signal that we are on the doorstep of fully autonomous cars or superintelligent machines. The achievements thus far have occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules, and these approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine intelligence.

The world we live in is wildly complex and open-ended. How can we bridge this gap? What will the consequences be when we do? Marcus and Davis show us what we need to accomplish before we can get there and argue that if we are wise along the way, we need not worry about a future of machine overlords; we will be able to create an AI that we can trust in our homes, our cars, and our doctor's offices. Rebooting AI provides a lucid, clear-eyed assessment of the current science and offers an inspiring vision of how AI can make our lives better.

Rebooting AI has been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Russian.

Illustrations by Maayan Harel

Hardcover | $28.95
Published by Pantheon
Sep 10, 2019 | 288 Pages | 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 | ISBN 9781524748258