There are two major problems confronting any author wishing to write a manual on artificial intelligence. The first is that by the time you’ve written it, the glacial pace of the book publishing world has effectively rendered your work obsolete before the ink has dried. Second, there are simply so many books produced on the subject that it’s virtually impossible to find a differentiating niche.

‘Confessions of an AI Brain’ (Springer, £25.00, ISBN 9783031259340) overcomes the first issue paradoxically by not attempting to say anything new, while the second is countered by the clever literary construction of telling the story from the first-person viewpoint of the AI ‘brain’ itself.

Miranda – as authors Elena Fersman, Paul Pettersson and Athanasios Karapantelakis have called their AI brain – is our patient guide throughout this thoroughly entertaining primer that might just as well have been called ‘Everything you always wanted to know about AI but were...