Thinking With Machines: The Brave New World of AI by Vasant Dhar.
Vasant holds a BA Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and an MS and PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Pittsburgh. He previously worked at Morgan Stanley, where he created the Data Mining Group focused on predicting financial markets and customer behavior.
He founded SCT Capital Management, one of the first machine?learning?based, automated hedge funds bringing predictive modeling and AI directly into real?world trading. Today Vasant is a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and also a professor at NYU’s Center for Data Science.
Thinking With Machines is one of the useful books on AI that I have read recently. Vasant is sharing with the reader not just what AI is, but how we can make decisions in today’s world that is now shaped by intelligent machines.
He succeeds delivering a practical guide for anyone trying to figure out when to trust AI—and when not to and insist on human judgment.
A clear understanding from early AI advancements
Vasant walks readers through AI’s early evolution that is more storytelling rather than a college textbook. This is a very important and often overlooked point. He traces AI back to its 1956 birth at Dartmouth College. This is perhaps a strong indicator that many today think AI is new. I recently attended an AI Summit event. The keynote speaker indicated AI has been used in business for more than 75 years. It’s 2026 today, not 2031.
Vasant is offering reader a very usable framework for deciding when AI can be trusted and when human oversight is mandatory. His examples include finance, healthcare, education, and most importantly the cost of errors. Perhaps his strongest lesson is when in today’s age of immediacy, users simply consume AI outputs due to social media influencers and the “AI hype cycle” found within LinkedIn, YouTube channels and other prosumer websites where influencers need sensationalized headlines to turn clicks into profits.
In conclusion, I highly recommend Thinking With Machines without hesitation. It’s that rare book that makes you feel both smarter and more responsible by the time you turn the last page—and it gives you a vocabulary and framework you’ll keep returning to whenever you encounter a new AI system in your life.