Melanie Mitchell

Award-winning Author, "Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans" | Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Twitter iconFacebook iconInstagram iconYoutube icon
Melanie Mitchell is a leading voice in the artificial intelligence space. She is an award-winning author and a Santa Fe Institute professor whose current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems.
Her book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans takes readers on a journey through the turbulent history of AI and into the successes of the modern era. She separates the hype from the realities of the technology, addressing concerns such as whether it’s actually intelligent and if it has the capacity to one day surpass us. Flavored with Mitchell’s humor and personal observations, the book is an indispensable guide to understanding artificial intelligence. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Cosmos Prize for Scientific Writing and in 2024 was named one of “5 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence” by the New York Times. The paper affectionately dubbed it “the Honda Civic of A.I. books” for its simplicity and elegance in addressing the most important questions about artificial intelligence.
Melanie’s first general audience book, Complexity: A Guided Tour, is an introduction to the sciences of complexity, an interdisciplinary set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. It won the Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was #3 on Amazon’s 10 Best Science Books the year it was published. 
Professor Mitchell founded Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Explorer platform which offers online courses and other educational resources related to the field of complex systems. Her online course, “Introduction to Complexity,” has been taken by over 25,000 students and was named one of Class Central’s “Best Free Online Courses of All Time.” She is also a prominent researcher of genetic algorithms and the author of a highly cited textbook, An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms.
Melanie is renowned for her teaching and writing on science and technology. Her essays and reviews in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems have appeared in the New York Times, Science Magazine, New Scientist, and Technological Review. She is the recipient of the Senior Scientific Award from the Complex Systems Society, the Distinguished Cognitive Scientist Award from UC Merced, and the Herbert A. Simon Award of the International Conference on Complex Systems.‍

Topics

How Close Are We to Artificial General Intelligence?

Since the 1970s, artificial general intelligence (AGI)—meaning AI systems that can do everything a human can do but better—has been "just a few years away." In that time, the definition of AGI has shifted away from including anything a human can do to all cognitive tasks humans are capable of, as it proved easier to build machines that can write essays than ones that can do laundry or unclog your toilet. In this presentation, Melanie Mitchell compares the technological views of intelligence that are often behind existential alignment problem fears of robot takeovers to the much more nuanced biological understandings of intelligence that argue that human intelligence is much more complex than simple goal optimization. Have worries of extinction level threats from superintelligent AI have been blown out of proportion? If machines ever do achieve true human level intelligence, it follows that they would also acquire the social, cultural, physical, and emotional intelligence that would prevent them from ending humanity to create more paper clips.

Show more

Videos

The Future of Artificial Intelligence | Distinctive Voices
Melanie Mitchell
Straight Talk on A.I. Large Language Models | Scripps Research
Melanie Mitchell
Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
Melanie Mitchell

Articles

Newspaper icon
Debates on the nature of artificial general intelligence
Science
Newspaper icon
Five Best: Understanding Artificial Intelligence
Wall Street Journal
Newspaper icon
Just How Intelligent is Artificial Intelligence?
National Academies
Newspaper icon
Using Counterfactual Tasks to Evaluate the Generality of Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models
arXiv
Newspaper icon
The Best 5 Books About Artificial Intelligence
New York Times
Newspaper icon
Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon
Wired
Newspaper icon
An "AI Breakthrough" on Systematic Generalization in Language?
AI Guide on Substack
Newspaper icon
Comparing Humans, GPT-4, and GPT-4V On Abstraction and Reasoning Tasks
arXiv
Newspaper icon
AI’s challenge of understanding the world
Science
Newspaper icon
Chat GPT broke the Turing test— the race is on for new ways to assess AI
nature
Newspaper icon
How do we know how smart AI systems are?
Science
Newspaper icon
Can a Computer Ever Learn to Talk?
OneZero | Medium
Newspaper icon
AI Can Pass Standardized Tests — But It Would Fail Preschool
Wired
Newspaper icon
Uncertain times
aeon

Podcasts

Testimonials

This speaker does not have any Articles yet.
Book Melanie Mitchell for your event
Request Availability
Download Bio
PDF icon
Artificial Intelligence
Technology
Innovation
Women's Voices
Twitter iconFacebook iconInstagram iconYoutube icon
By continuing to browse you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. If you do not wish to allow cookies, please see our cookie policy for instructions. Learn more