Psst! Psst! Psst!

Today we commenced The Little Learner, the text that will occupy the group for many months to come. We read the Preface and the first page of Chapter 0.

Our discussion focussed mainly on the book’s authorial persona and implied reader. For those of us in the group who have a mainly adversarial attitude towards AI, the book presented a challenge. Isn’t deep learning interesting and fun? Aren’t the algorithms elegant and surprisingly simple? Shouldn’t everyone dive into this fresh and exciting area of research, and learn how to do it?

To invite the reader into the text, Friedman and Mendhakar carefully establish the reader as a novice, and themselves as kind, avuncular teachers. The reader need only know “high-school maths” and have a minimum of “programming experience.” The book proceeds from these foundations in a strict order, to build up from simple pieces the whole complex machinery of modern deep learning.

As some in the group observed, this “novice” reader was already expected to know some terms of art. Concepts such as “problem domain,” “equalities,” “invariants,” “superset” and “subset” were introduced as though they were the general coinage of the realm. Of course, all textbook writers face the problem that their students need to somehow learn the language that even makes it possible to express knowledge of their subject. How can you learn anything about a topic without having the words to describe the topic? But we as a group are intrigued to see precisely who or what these writers assume an interested and relatively ignorant reader to be as the book progresses.

We discussed the possible ideological implications of the book. Is this a book that subtly asserts a “tech-bro” persona? Or does its goofy and academic tone bespeak a different attitude? In our disciplines, we worry endlessly about surveillance capitalism, about the power of tech billionaires, about the algorithmic mediation of human interaction. The writers of The Little Learner sidestep such issues. Deep leaning is fun. It’s for categorising cat photos, not for empowering intelligence agencies to more rapidly scan citizens’ text messages. It’s something anyone can do as a hobby, rather than a tool used by rich and powerful people to make themselves richer and more powerful.

Everyone agreed the book is fun, and the topic is interesting. We will see in coming months how we can reconcile the fun with the cultural critique.

Any code written in the sessions can be found in the Github repository for this reading.