Yeah that's the thing, this as a field has been a thing for quite a while. When I was in college 25 years ago we had dedicated AI classes. Only we wrote in LISP. We didn't ask an AI to write for us. The other way around.

I used to own that book too! I got it at a library book sale I think, back in the late 90s. The illustrations were pretty cool, and it was a pretty good summary of the field in the mid-80s.

I also owned "Secrets of a Super Hacker by The Knightmare"!

I might still have them somewhere in storage.

Can you look who did that cover art, or the art director

Published 1 year before the second AI winter. This looks like a general-audience book, but most of the things you would find in an ML textbook published in 1986 would still be applicable today. The fundamentals haven't changed, just some new techniques and more computing power being available. Hinton popularized backprop (which is basically just an application of the chain rule from calculus) on neural networks in the 80s, and that's still how the errors are propagated during training of the newest LLMs.

Part of the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown book series whose commercials you could not miss on television in the 1990s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4zBYh2PUyk

Update: Or maybe not, according to the wikipedia article. The size, shape, and characteristic embossing certainly do evoke the true article. It fooled me!