The Book of Why. The New Science of Cause and Effect

"Correlation is not causation." This mantra once led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established 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.
Pearl's work enables even more : it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and the key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.