Top Highlights

• On the first level, you have statistical reasoning, which can tell you only how seeing one event would change your belief about another.
• I view machine learning as a tool to get us from data to probabilities. But then we still have to make two extra steps to go from probabilities into real understanding—two big steps. One is to predict the effect of actions, and the second is counterfactual imagination. We cannot claim to understand reality unless we make the last two steps.
• McCarthy, in turn, coined the term “artificial intelligence” and became a founding father of that field.
• In the 1980s, Judea Pearl introduced a new approach to artificial intelligence called Bayesian networks. This probability-based model of machine reasoning enabled machines to function—in a complex and uncertain world—as “evidence engines,” continuously revising their beliefs in light of new evidence.
• Within a few years, Judea’s Bayesian networks had completely overshadowed the previous rule-based approaches to artificial intelligence.