Sooner or later a child asks the smart speaker whether it likes them. It answers, and then everybody in the kitchen goes quiet for a second, because nobody is completely sure what just happened. That is the whole subject in miniature: a machine that follows instructions, a person who wants to know whether anybody is home, and the surprisingly hard question of how you would tell. Children get there faster than adults do — they will happily debate whether a thing that learns your name is thinking, whether a rover that has been alone on Mars for fifteen years is lonely, and whether a robot who raises a gosling counts as its mother. Alan Turing asked the same question in 1950 and had the good sense to ask it in a way an eight-year-old can argue about.
Bookroo’s collection of 57 artificial intelligence books runs from a picture book about a girl who takes a screwdriver to her new doll all the way to novels about a school where some of the students were manufactured, and our editors pulled out twelve that cover the distance. There are read-alouds for children who mostly want to know how a computer knows things, graphic novels that explain the real engineering, and middle grade stories that hand a reader a machine and let them decide for themselves what it deserves. Start with the shortlist, then browse the age shelves below — picture books first, then the chapter books that keep a fifth grader arguing at the dinner table.
A robot wakes up alone on a wild island with no instructions, and learns the animals’ language by listening until it makes sense.
Five robots defy their programming to rescue their inventor from a controlling corporation.
Thirty years after the robots took over, a perfectly obedient one finds a twelve-year-old human girl who should not exist.
A Mars rover faces perilous challenges and unexpected emotions on a mission to survive.
A robot enrolls at a middle school already being run by a disciplinary program that does not make exceptions.
A prankster uncovers the secret behind his too-perfect teacher.
Max’s best friend vanishes over the summer, and the note she leaves behind insists that she was real.
An AI paperclip threatens Earth. Can a powerless cat save the universe?
Discover the hidden history and future of robots with a mechanical bird guide.
A graphic-novel history of thinking machines, from ancient calculators to the software in your pocket.
A girl who would rather have a gadget gets a doll instead, so she opens it up to see what it can do.
The boy who loved numbers grew up to break an unbreakable code, and then asked whether a machine could think.
Read-alouds about machines that learn, dolls that need debugging, robots working out what a word means, and the man who first asked whether a machine could think. Ages 3–8.
A robot's quest to understand love leads to unexpected discoveries.
A science fair robot spirals into chaos. Can she control the mayhem?
A young girl tries to build a sandcastle with the help of her robot on the last day of summer vacation.
A robot stranded on an island must adapt to survive.
Discover how computers think and solve problems with coding basics.
Robot teachers, rogue apps, Mars rovers, runaway androids, and graphic-novel histories of how machines learned to do anything at all. Ages 6–11.
A girl discovers dark secrets behind a technology that lets her talk to her comatose friend.
A real dog and a robot dog seek forever homes from a unique shelter.
A young girl navigates the challenges of fifth grade with the help of a robot companion.
A young girl creates a machine that can change its appearance to please everyone, but it quickly gets out of control and threatens to destroy the world
A robot joins fifth grade, turning Sammy's world upside down. Can it prove being smart is cool?
Can Robot Roz navigate the civilized world to reunite with her island home?
A fourth-grader navigates a week with a new substitute teacher, a personal digital assistant, that is taking over the school.
A boy navigates the challenges of having a genius inventor mother and a sister with a severe immunodeficiency condition.
Earth's chaos leads two friends on a cosmic quest to uncover a mysterious hacker.
A virtual game hides a sentient AI. Can Ash and Ruby escape a deadly conspiracy before it's too late?
A girl must break isolation to deliver life-saving medicine in a sealed world.
A boy discovers a clumsy, outdated robot. Can he save it from destruction?
