'A terrific book - essential reading for everyone seeking to make sense of Artificial Intelligence' Professor Sir Adrian Smith, Director and Chief Executive of the Alan Turing Institute

In this myth-busting guide to AI past and present, one of the world's leading researchers shows why our fears for the future are misplaced.
The ultimate dream of AI is to build machines that are like us: conscious and self-aware. While this remains a remote possibility, rapid progress in AI is already transforming our world. Yet the public debate is still largely centred on unlikely prospects, from sentient machines to dystopian robot takeovers.
In this lively and clear-headed guide, Michael Wooldridge challenges the prevailing narrative, revealing how the hype distracts us from both the more immediate risks that this technology poses - from algorithmic bias to fake news - and the true life-changing potential of the field. The Road to Conscious Machines elucidates the discoveries of AI's greatest pioneers from Alan Turing to Demis Hassabis, and what today's researchers actually think and do.
'Nobody understands the past, the present, the promise and the peril of this new technology better than Michael Wooldridge. The definitive account' Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
'Effortlessly readable. The perfect guide to the history and future of AI' Tom Chivers, author of The AI Does Not Hate You

Michael Wooldridge is a professor of Computer Science and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Hertford College. He has been an AI researcher since 1989, and has published more than 400 scientific articles on the subject. From 2014 to 2016, he was President of the European Association for AI, and from 2015 to 2017 he was President of the International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI). He lives in Oxford with his wife and two children.