#ACMBookClub 2026

The ACM Book Club is back! Join us starting Sunday, February 22, to read leading computer scientist and award-winning author Melanie Mitchell's acclaimed Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, which has remained a touchstone for debates since its initial publication in 2019. 

As early as 1961, AI enthusiasts and popular media predicted the imminent arrival of machines with human-level intelligence. Now, with the advent of generative AI, large language models, and similar systems, "is the AGI rabbit finally being pulled out of the tech industry’s hat?"

Writing the book amid the pre-2020 predictions of near-term AGI, Mitchell was spurred by "the cognitive dissonance" between expert predictions and her observations of the field. She wanted to "dig much more deeply into AI’s current state and look more closely at what “human-level intelligence” actually means." 

In the years since the book was published, the breakneck development of AI has only made its insights more relevant and urgent. "Perhaps the most important question is," Mitchell writes in the new preface, "What do we humans want from intelligent machines in the first place? Do we want to strive for machines that can fully replace us ... or would we be better off with ones that augment our own intelligence?"

If you are curious about the answer, grab a copy and join us.

About the ACM Book Club

The ACM Book Club is a communal reading series from the Association for Computing Machinery. Join us for a journey of curiosity, inspiration, and conversation surrounding key issues in computing and technology today. For each session, we join fellow readers around the world to dive into a recent title handpicked by the ACM staff or the community. Each week, we share quotes and author interviews online, concluding with a finale conversation with the author or an ACM expert to unpack the book.

Reading Schedule

Week 1 (Feb 22 - 28)    

  • Preface & Part I: Background

Week 2 (Mar 1 - 7)

  • Part II: Looking and Seeing

Week 3 (March 8 - 14)

  • Part III: Learning to Play
  • Part IV: A.I. Meets Natural Language

Week 4 (Mar 15 - 21)

  • Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

Finale Discussion

Date: March 24, 2026 (Tuesday)

Time: 1-2 p.m. PT/4-5 p.m. ET

Zoom Registration: https://acm-org.zoom.us/meeting/register/SPOuKp2uT4WeGG3gwhdWJA 

Speaker Bio

Melanie Mitchell is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research is at the intersection between artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems; she has authored or edited six books and published numerous scholarly papers in these fields. Her 2009 book Complexity: A Guided Tour won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, and her 2019 book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans was named as one of the five best books on AI by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Melanie’s public outreach on science includes a quarterly column for Science Magazine, a Substack newsletter on AI, a 2024 podcast on “The Nature of Intelligence,” and a free online course, “Introduction to Complexity” on the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Explorer website.