Master the technology reshaping our world today.

In a series of 50 accessible essays, Keith Mansfield introduces and explains the essential concepts, ideas and key thinkers behind artificial intelligence.

From Alan Turing asking 'can machines think?' and the best prompting techniques for generative AI, to Superintelligence and the Singularity, 50 AI Ideas You Really Need to Know is a complete introduction to the most important AI concepts: past, present and future.


Excellent balance between perspective and technical understanding and great clarity. - Neil Lawrence, inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, and author of The Atomic Human.

Excellent balance between perspective and technical understanding and great clarity. -- Neil Lawrence, inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, and author of The Atomic Human.

Keith Mansfield began publishing books about AI, specifically on neural networks, in the early 1990s, when these were considered extremely unfashionable. In the noughties he worked on major AI textbooks, before publishing Nick Bostrom's New York Times bestseller Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies in 2014 - a book that helped kickstart the AI Safety debate and led indirectly to the formation of OpenAI and the release of ChatGPT. A science fiction author in his spare time, he has worked at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, and is currently the popular science publisher for Penguin Press, working alongside the likes of Khan Academy's Sal Khan on generative AI in education, and Senior Turing Fellow and Cambridge DeepMind Professor Neil Lawrence on the role of AI in today's society. Based in London, he is also the author of The Future in Minutes.