The Importance of Being Educable

“Winner of the PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics, Association of American Publishers”“Winner of the PROSE Award in Computing and Information Sciences, Association of American Publishers”“Longlisted for the Non-Obvious Book Awards”“A New Yorker Best Book of the Year”“It’s ‘educability,’ not intelligence, that matters most.”—Joshua Rothman, New Yorker“This brief, philosophical treatise will be a thoughtful addition to academic collections focused on artificial intelligence and human learning.” * Library Journal *“Intelligence lacks a clear and agreed definition in science, leading to confusion about IQ and the potential of artificial intelligence. Leslie Valiant, a pioneer of machine learning, prefers to define human intellectual uniqueness as educability instead of intelligence … in his complex but jargon-free book.”—Andrew Robinson, Nature

Leslie Valiant is the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Recipient of the Turing Award and the Nevanlinna Prize for his foundational contributions to machine learning and computer science, he is the author of Probably Approximately Correct and Circuits of the Mind.