Book Review-Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans By Melanie Mitchell

Ever since the explosion and proliferation of Chatbots in the AI sector, the superlatives and attacks on the idea of using AI have also proliferated. The fictional content of the announcements in social media and specialty media has been mind numbing. I had reached a point of not knowing what I could or could not believe.

I realized that what I needed was not what many are offering, their opinions disguised as informative articles on what AI entails, but a primer on the technologies that the articles are throwing out for public consumption. Many, like me, have become inured to the media content without ever understanding the technology, nor had I ever dug into the granularities which is fundamental to the technologies. I also desired a concise and precise history of how this revolution came about, which is my usual modus operandi when investigating a topic that was new to me. Although one cannot exist in the technology world without having been exposed to AI.

I had fortunately come upon Melanie Mitchell’s book in my endless wanderings in the vast spaces of the bookstore websites. This, was what I needed and wanted. It also didn’t hurt that Mitchell’s credentials are impeccable as far as the AI world is concerned. She did her PhD with the renowned Douglas Hofstadter of the University of Michigan and the authors of Gödel, Escher, Bach. She has created her own AI system as a part of her research. Finally, she has joint appointments at Portland State and the Santa Fe Institute.  

This book gave me everything I wanted; it demystified and explained all the buzzwords presently flying about in conversations about AI. She did so in chronological order, starting with the 1956 workshop organized by John McCarthy, who coined the misleading term Artificial Intelligence,  and held in Dartmouth. She laid out the evolution of AI, diving deep enough into the methods and algorithms of such topics as Symbolic AI, sub-symbolic AI, expert systems, Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet), Deep Learning, Machine Learning, back propagation, large language model (LLM), reinforcement learning, etc.

She also introduced the readers to historical figures like John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon and discussed their contributions to the area. She also contemporary figures like Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus, and their recent contributions to the burgeoning field.

I particularly like the way she interposed history with concise but highly understandable explanations of how the technology evolved and developed, it gave the book a multi-dimensional appeal as each dimension reinforced the other dimensions without seeming chaotic and disorganized. On the contrary, the organization of the book was perfect for a relative novice to gain not only information and knowledge but also insight and understanding. I would highly recommend this book for those who are curious about this thing called AI and wish to be informed, and for those who are curious about the history of the technology and the people who are the historical innovators.

 

Book Review-The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

One of my reading committee members recommended this book to me as I was getting his signature for my thesis. He knew my interest in the philosophy of science and told me that I HAD to read this book because it makes clear how scientific advancements evolve along with the process of scientific discoveries.  Not long after that encounter, I bought the book with the greatest of intentions.

It sat in a prominent place in my bookshelf for years. It travelled with me across the country from job to job, city to city. It was always on my To Be Read list and prominent in my psyche. I finally got around to sit down to reading it as I entered the latter part of my engineering career. In some ways, I thought that since I was participating in the evolving scientific process as an engineer, I was creating the structure of the scientific revolution. It wasn’t until after I became more experienced that I sensed the rhythm of the evolution of science and engineering that I realized that this book should have been read long ago. It was also during that period that I became aware that the structure that Kuhn describes happens to everything that goes through both evolutionary and revolutionary changes, which is just about everything.

As Kuhn lays out the steps of his structure, emphasizes that the step to a revolution is benignly unspectacular, until the exceptions to the rule stack up, where our scientific dogmas from accumulated historical perceptions are increasing violated by reality. Kuhn takes a fine scalpel to our accepted beliefs that make up the normal sciences. Kuhn terms these accepted beliefs paradigms. They are more than just beliefs however; these are conjectures and derived knowledge that had been determined to be true through empirical verification. Kuhn is very careful with his argument, as a practiced philosopher does. He steps through his structure in fine granularity, and he tries to anticipate objections, using salient scientific history of ideas to illustrate his assertions. This is not just a philosophical treatise but also a review of scientific history that frames his structure, most notably the Copernican revolution as compared to the Ptolemaic ideas. One hundred and seventy-three pages devoted to outlining his structure, but mostly to convince the reader, through examples and logic, that this structure is not just a whimsical edifice, fragile and delicate. Instead, Kuhn worked diligently to convince the reader of the reality of the structure.

The ubiquity of Kuhn’s idea is something that took me by surprise. This is proof that he has been successful in convincing the world of his idea. As I was reading the book, my thoughts were not: this is revolutionary. My thoughts were: of course, that is the way it has always been and should be. Which proved to me that Kuhn’s ideas were such common sense that no one had objected to his proposal, or that Kuhn’s ideas had been so seamlessly integrated into our perspectives that it has been tightly woven into how we perceive scientific ideas. The phrase “paradigm shift”  has so seamlessly been appropriated into our vocabulary that it is an anchor phrase when discussing changing long held beliefs; it is so accepted that many humorously and sarcastically skewers the uninformed user of the term.

Most importantly, Kuhn’s phrases: normal science, anomalies that challenge the paradigm, and the revolutionary overthrow of paradigms are deeply ingrained in our psyche when we think of revolutionary changes in the sciences. It is so ingrained that as I was reading the book I found myself asking: what’s the big deal? But it is a big deal, it formalizes how scientists and technologists abstract the methodologies of their field to create more accurate explanations which are truer to what reality is showing us.

Yet, as I was reading the book, I find myself marveling at the breadths and depths of Kuhn’s explications. He sought not only to convince the scientists, but the philosophers and historians.

I read the Enlarged Second edition of Kuhn’s book. It included an extensive Postscript at the end of the book. The original book was published in 1962, the Second edition was published in 1970. It is somewhat surprising that a treatise such as this would get a second edition so quickly, it indicates that the content of the book is considered to be important enough and had elicited sufficient interest to warrant the second edition. The postscript by Kuhn is his opportunity to address his critics and clarify what he thought needed to be clarified. It is an interesting juxtaposition of his thoughts, a scant eight years apart.

Since the second edition, the third and fourth editions has been published, in 1996 and 2012. The 2012 edition is a celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the book’s publication. Since Thomas S. Kuhn passed away, I suspect that the additions to the fourth edition involve commentaries on the historical significance of Kuhn’s work, there is also a 2020 edition but does not seem to indicate it is a new edition.

I am happy that I finally read this book, a book that can be said to have laid out a framework of scientific advancement in the 20^th century and still have an impact on scientific advancements in the 21st century. It was not an easy read, I read it chapter by chapter, took copious amounts of notes — trying to capture the essence of the abstractions, and then tried to summarize Kuhn’s thoughts in my own words in order to gain better understanding of the powerful ideas.