Weekend Roundup: Artificial Intelligence
A selection of articles, videos, and books that have influenced my thinking on AI
Weekend Roundup: This is a loose post format I will be using in the future to curate thought-provoking articles and media on selected topics. This weekend’s focus will be on machine learning and AI, particularly how they intersect with science and healthcare.
The third magic: A meditation on history, science, and AI
This excellent blog post by economist Noah Smith places the current boom in AI (really “deep learning”) in the context of the history of scientific breakthroughs in theory and methods since the 1600s. One of the best things he does is breakdown the critique that we don’t know how these models fundamentally work and offer understanding it on its own terms:
A big knock on AI is that because it doesn’t really let you understand the things you’re predicting, it’s unscientific. And in a formal sense, I think this is true. But instead of spending our effort on a neverending (and probably fruitless) quest to make AI fully interpretable, I think we should recognize that science is on…
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