书名：The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect为什么：因果关系的新科学

作者：Judea Pearl；Dana Mackenzie
出版社名称：Penguin
出版时间：2019
语种：英文
ISBN：9780141982410
商品尺寸：12.9 x 2.4 x 19.8 cm
包装：平装
页数：432（以实物为准）
是图灵奖得主、人工智能先驱、贝叶斯网络之父朱迪亚·珀尔发表的著作，一经推出就引起广泛关注，其中提出了和当前主流人工智能理论不同的观点，认为当前的AI深陷于概率关联的泥潭，而忽略了因果关系的研究。

身为UCLA计算机科学系的教授，朱迪亚·珀尔曾两次居于科学革命的中心：一次是在20世纪80年代，他为人工智能引入了一套新的工具，叫贝叶斯网络。二次革命，鉴于贝叶斯网络在计算上的优势，他意识到简单的图模型和概率论（正如贝叶斯网络中的那样）也能用于因果关系的推理。这一发现为人工智能的发展奠定了另一个基础，但意义远非如此，这一险证因果关系的、条理性的数学方法，几乎已经被所有科学和社会科学领域采用。

这次的著作就是为了向大众解释，对于人工智能的理解，不仅仅是局限于使机器建立关联概念，的是发展因果逻辑推理的能力，从而让机器真正拥有思考力，甚至实现自由意志。

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.

Review
“Have you ever wondered about the puzzles of correlation and causation? This wonderful book has illuminating answers and it is fun to read”(Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize author of Thinking, Fast and Slow)

“Judea Pearl has been the heart and soul of a revolution in artificial intelligence and in computer science more broadly”(Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow and Director, Microsoft Research Labs)

“Pearl's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence… and they have redefined the term 'thinking machine'”(Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.)

“Modern applications of AI, such as robotics, self-driving cars, speech recognition, and machine translation deal with uncertainty.” (Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research, Google, Inc.)
在本书The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect《为什么：因果关系的新科学》中，人工智能领域的很好不错专家朱迪亚·珀尔及其同事领导的因果关系革命突破多年的迷雾，厘清了知识的本质，确立了因果关系研究在科学探索中的核心地位。而因果关系科学真正重要的应用则体现在人工智能领域。

作者在本书中回答的核心问题是：如何让智能机器像人一样思考？换言之，“强人工智能”可以实现吗？借助因果关系之梯的三个层级逐步深入地揭示因果推理的本质，并据此构建出相应的自动化处理工具和数学分析范式，作者给出了一个肯定的答案。

作者认为，今天为我们所熟知的大部分机器学习技术，都建基于相关关系，而非因果关系。要实现强人工智能，乃至将智能机器转变为具有道德意识的体，我们就必须让机器学会问“为什么”，也就是要让机器学会因果推理，理解因果关系。或许，这正是我们能对准备接管我们未来生活的智能机器所做的很有意义的工作。
朱迪亚·珀尔，生于1936年9月4日，以色列裔美国计算机科学家和哲学家，因其人工智能概率方法的杰出成绩和贝叶斯网络（Bayesian network，又称信念网络Belief Network）的研发而知名，因果建模数学化应用到科学的人之一。2011年，他因通过概率和因果推理的算法研发在人工智能取得的杰出贡献而获得计算机解学很高荣誉图灵奖（Turing Award）。朱迪亚·珀尔将图灵奖的大部分奖金捐赠用于支持Daniel Pearl基金会项目，另一部分用于促进在因果推理的统计教育。

Judea Pearl is a world-renowned Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, known for hisworld-leading work in Al and the development of Bayesian networks, as well as his theory of causal and counterfactual inference. In 2011, he won the most prestigious award in computer science, the Alan Turing Award. He has also received the Rumelhart Prize (Cognitive Science Society), the Benjamin Franklin Medal(Franklin Institute) and the Lakatos Award(London School of Economics), and he is the founder and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation.
IN the beginning....

I was probably six or seven years old when I first read the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. My classmates and I were not at all surprised by God's capricious demands, forbidding them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Deities have their reasons, we thought. What we were more intrigued by was the idea that as soon as they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve became conscious, like us, of their nakedness.

As teenagers, our interest shifted slowly to the more philosophical aspects of the story.(Israeli students read Genesis several times a year.) Of primary concern to us was the notion that the emergence of human knowledge was not a joyful process but a painful one, accompanied by disobedience, guilt, and punishment. Was it worth giving up the carefree life of Eden? some asked. Were the agricultural and scientific revolutions that followed worth the economic hardships, wars, and social injustices that modern life entails?

Don't get me wrong: we were no creationists; even our teachers were Darwinists at heart. We knew, however, that the author who choreographed the story of Genesis struggled to answer the most pressing philosophical questions of his time. We likewise suspected that this story bore the cultural footprints of the actual process by which Homo sapiens gained dominion over our planet. What, then, was the sequence of steps in this speedy, super-evolutionary process?

My interest in these questions waned in my early career as a professor of engineering but was reignited suddenly in the 1990s, when, while writing my book Causality, I confronted the Ladder of Causation.

As I reread Genesis for the hundredth time, I noticed a nuance that had somehow eluded my attention for all those years. When God finds Adam hiding in the garden, he asks, "Have you eaten from the tree which I forbade you?"And Adam answers, "The woman you gave me for a companion, she gave me fruit from the tree and I ate.""What is this you have done?"God asks Eve. She replies, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."