Book signing: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence and AI in Shipping

Please note that this event takes place in person on 5 June 2024 at 20:00 BST (London time).

Paul Bilokon, Oleksandr Bilokon, and Nataliya Bilokon have recently published, with general public audience in mind,

A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brief-History-Artificial-Intelligence-Thalesians/dp/B0CV898K4M/ (February 2024)

In addition, Oleksandr Bilokon has published

Artificial Intelligence in Shipping and Logistics: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Artificial-Intelligence-Logistics-Thalesians-Technology/dp/B0CX8JYY54/ (March 2024)

We'll be organizing a public lecture followed by a book signing.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming business, science, technology, and medicine. Achievements that one could only dream of in the 20th century have materialized in the 21st: AlphaGo has beaten Lee Sedol at the game of Go, probably the hardest game that humanity has invented; intelligent machines created by an army of quants (mathematicians and computer scientists) have been gradually displacing human traders on Wall Street and in the City of London; protein folding, a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, has essentially been solved by AlphaFold, with unprecedented implications for areas like drug design and environmental sustainability.

Even before the advent of AI, technological advances such as social media, Deliveroo, and Uber have transformed the lives of numerous people, sometimes creating new, sometimes eliminating existing jobs. The emergence of large language models (LLMs), such as GPT behind the AI system ChatGPT, means that AI is now almost universally available and will transform your life – for worse or better. It is therefore essential to be informed about the AI well before its universal adoption.

The purpose of this book is to make AI accessible to literally everyone: whether you are currently at primary or secondary school, preparing to join or already at college or university, working in the academe at masters or PhD level or beyond, doing an AI-related – or a totally unrelated – job, running a business, serving a religious organisation, a charity, a country, and/or a government. Irrespective of whether you are not in the work pool, unemployed, employed, self-employed, retired, if you are interested in what dangers and opportunities are presented to you personally, and other people around you, by AI, this book is for you.
If you are a busy executive or, more generally, decision maker, this short book (less than 100 pages long) will serve to update you on the current state-of-the-art in AI.

The primary purpose of this book is to inform. The secondary, to entertain and inspire. This is not an academic treatise, so there are (almost) no formulae and no citations. There are some anecdotes that, we hope, you will find intriguing. Granted, you may not have heard of all the references (just as we would not have heard of all the references that you have heard of!), but you have an unfair advantage: access to search engines, such as Google.

Read this book, and you will learn why AI has been created, what it is, how it works and how to use it, as well as what will happen (and what won't happen) if you start adopting AI today.