MACHINES THAT LEARN introduces young people in their teens to a technology that will undoubtedly make their generation unique in the history of humankind as this evolution in electronic computing takes over more and more roles that humans alone could fill previously.  This advance does not represent the invention of a new machine.  Instead, we have a new way of using digital computers.  Computers have grown larger in capacity and faster at processing over the decades, but they still do the same operations they have always done.  Now new methods of programming allow these machines to steadily improve their performance taking advantage of dazzling speed and flawless memory to master tasks only human minds could do previously.  Indeed, such systems are doing tasks individual humans cannot accomplish.

Young people today need to know about this new technology and use that understanding to plan their futures carefully, setting perhaps novel life goals in a radically changing world.

“For more than 250 years the fundamental drivers of economic growth have been technological innovations.  The most important of these are what economists call general-purpose technologies — a category that includes the steam engine, electricity, and the internal combustion engine.  The most important general- purpose technology of our era is artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning.” —Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2018

It is hard to imagine a more exciting time to be a teenager.