Book of Why

The hugely influential book on how the understanding of causality revolutionized science and the world, by the pioneer of artificial intelligence

'Wonderful ... illuminating and fun to read' Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winner and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

'Correlationdoes not imply causation.' For decades, this mantra was invoked by scientists in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thingcaused another, such as smoking and cancer, or carbon dioxide and globalwarming. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparkedby world-renowned computer scientist Judea Pearl and his colleagues, hascut through a century of confusion and placed cause and effect on afirm scientific basis. Now, Pearl and science journalist Dana Mackenzie explain causal thinking to general readers for the first time, showinghow it allows us to explore the world that is and the worlds that couldhave been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. Andjust as Pearl's discoveries have enabled machines to think better, TheBook of Why explains how we too can think better.

'Pearl's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and have redefined the term "thinking machine"' Vint Cerf

Reviews

Modern applications of AI, such as robotics, self-driving cars, speech recognition, and machine translation deal with uncertainty. Pearl has been instrumental in supplying the rationale and much valuable technology that allow these applications to flourish