You Look Like A Thing And I Love You by Janelle Shane
I had never run across Shane’s AI Weirdness online, so this book was my first taste. It’s great! I was giggling out loud (which elicited a withering glare from the cat). I love it.
Shane does a wonderful job of ‘splainin this stuff, and her examples help bring the AI hype down to Earth. She sketches out how the common variations of machine learning work, how they are built, and how they go off the rails.
I’m pretty familiar with this territory. “You. Stupid. Computer” has one of the major themes of my career. Yes, children, we were inventing all this crazy nonsense decades ago.
As I sometimes summarize my own career, thanks to our work, we can now make a lot more stupid mistakes thousands of times faster. It’s not so much how badly the dog (or perhaps giraffe) dances, it’s that it dances at all. And today, the giraffe’s a lot bigger, dances a lot faster, and sometimes threatens life, liberty, and the pursuit of giraffes. You’re welcome!
So, I can attest that she’s absolutely right technically and also anthropologically. AI’s not evil, though it can be dangerous, and Shane has just the right balance of wonder (“look—the dog giraffe is dancing”) and skepticism (“but it’s a laughably bad dancer!”)
Most important, Shane is really good at ‘splainin stuff. The relationship between training sets and weird or not results. How machine learning learns. The endless entertainment of trying to devise goals and rewards, and the perverse ability of computers to find shortcuts. How computers copy human biases. And more.
With so much AI being deployed, this book is a timely and important public service. Everyone needs to understand this wackiest of recent human creations.
(You can find more at Shane’s blog.)
- Janelle Shane, You Look Like A Thing And I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place, New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2019.
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