在本书中，人工智能领域的权威专家朱迪亚·珀尔及其同事领导的因果关系革命突破多年的迷雾，厘清了知识的本质，确立了因果关系研究在科学探索中的核心地位。
而因果关系科学真正重要的应用则体现在人工智能领域。作者在本书中回答的核心问题是：如何让智能机器像人一样思考？换言之，“强人工智能”可以实现吗？借助因果关系之梯的三个层级逐步深入地揭示因果推理的本质，并据此构建出相应的自动化处理工具和数学分析范式，作者给出了一个肯定的答案。作者认为，今天为我们所熟知的大部分机器学习技术，都建基于相关关系，而非因果关系。要实现强人工智能，乃至将智能机器转变为具有道德意识的有机体，我们就必须让机器学会问“为什么”，也就是要让机器学会因果推理，理解因果关系。或许，这正是我们能对准备接管我们未来生活的智能机器所做的最有意义的工作。

A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how 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, that taboo is 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. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.

Written by one of the preeminent researchers in the field, this book provides a comprehensive exposition of modern analysis of causation. It shows how causality has grown from a nebulous concept into a mathematical theory with significant applications in the fields of statistics, artificial intelligence, economics, philosophy, cognitive science, and the health and social sciences. Judea Pearl presents and unifies the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual, and structural approaches to causation and devises simple mathematical tools for studying the relationships between causal connections and statistical associations. Cited in more than 2,100 scientific publications, it continues to liberate scientists from the traditional molds of statistical thinking. In this revised edition, Judea Pearl elucidates thorny issues, answers readers' questions, and offers a panoramic view of recent advances in this field of research. Causality will be of interest to students and professionals in a wide variety of fields. Dr Judea Pearl has received the 2011 Rumelhart Prize for his leading research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and systems from The Cognitive Science Society.