How Minds Are Made: Understanding Artificial Intelligence from the Inside Out

A clear, definitive guide to how artificial intelligence works, from the inside out. AI can now do things once thought possible only for the human mind. This book gives you one powerful idea for making sense of it all. A mind builds an inner model of the world and uses that model to predict what will happen next. Your brain does this every waking second, and today's most advanced AI systems are learning to do something strikingly similar. Beginning with one of humanity's oldest questions, "What is a mind?", you'll follow the thinkers who spent centuries searching for an answer, then discover how machines turn raw data into working models of the world that let them predict, reason, and plan. From there you'll confront the questions that will define the age of AI. What happens when intelligent systems pursue goals? How do we keep their actions aligned with human values? And what kind of world emerges when many artificial minds interact, compete, and cooperate at a scale no society has faced before? By the end, you won't simply know more about AI. You'll have a framework for understanding where it came from, what it is becoming, and how to judge the claims being made about it for yourself. To understand the most important technology of our time, start with how minds are made.