The first chapter in the book provides a detailed analysis of how other disciplines contribute to the idea of AI - from Philosophy to Psychology, Biology to Computer Science. Makes for an interesting read, even for a non-tech reader.
If you're also looking for a course that goes alongside the book, I highly recommend UC Berkley's CS188 (you can find it at http://ai.berkeley.edu).
The lecturer Pieter Abbeel does such a good job explaining stuff and the programming exercises are really neat.
Edit: Formatting
This alongside Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course was my first exposure to the field. https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
I can also recommend Sebastian Thrun's Artificial Ingelligence for Robotics course: https://www.udacity.com/course/artificial-intelligence-for-r...