A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence "Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality -- the study of cause and effect -- on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs
The Book of Why.
An argument for how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence.
"Illuminating." -New York Times
"Extraordinary." -Science Friday
"Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, once led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, with causal analysis taking center stage in AI and other applications, the old taboos are a thing of the past.
The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and others, established causality on a firm scientific basis. Pearl showed how intuitive models can interface with data to help answer causal questions, such as whether a drug will cure an illness or, counterfactually, whether an illness would have persisted absent the drug. These models provide a blueprint for causal AI to learn and take responsibility for its mistakes.
Updated with a new preface and summary of recent advances, The Book of Why outlines the basics of cause and effect for lay readers and scientists alike, providing tools to explore the observable world and worlds that might have been.
