The Book of Why

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, it's 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.