'Wonderful ... Illuminating ... Fun to read' Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
A pioneer of artificial intelligence shows how the study of causality revolutionized science and the world
'Correlation does not imply causation.' This mantra was invoked by scientists for decades in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking and cancer and carbon dioxide and global warming. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by world-renowned computer scientist Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed cause and effect on a firm scientific basis. Now, Pearl and science journalist Dana Mackenzie explain causal thinking to general readers for the first time, showing how it allows us to explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. And just as Pearl's discoveries have enabled machines to think better, The Book of Why explains how we can think better.
Arguing that correlation does sometimes imply causation, despite the influence of the contrary idea across the developing scientific thought of the past, "The Book Of Why" presents what causal thinking can reveal about the contemporary world, and how it can be understood as central to human and artificial intelligence.
