Reddit mentions of The Essence of Artificial Intelligence

I like both of the books that you mention, but Bostrom's Superintelligence is more about the impacts of a certain kind of AI that most researchers aren't even working on. Hawking's On Intelligence is probably nicer if you're interested in how AI (and the neocortex) might work, but you should realize that it's just one approach.

Ray Kurzweil's How to Create a Mind is also about reverse-engineering the brain. For an overview of the history of the field, I recommend checking out Nils Nilsson's The Quest for AI which has a free online web version (pdf). If you're more interested in the subfield of machine learning, you might also try Pedro Domingos' The Master Algorithm.

And how do you feel about undergraduate textbooks? Undergraduates are laymen before they start reading these and taking their courses, right? The AI textbook is Russell & Norvig's AI: A Modern Approach, but it's very extensive. Some lighter reading we used in one of my courses was The Essence of AI by Alison Cawsey, and from I remember it was fine, but when I was searching for it I also saw many more introductory books that I didn't read, but which might be better (and/or more recent). I just don't know. There's also a pretty good free online textbook by Poole and Mackworth.