Minimal Updates

A few argmin announcements from the road

This week, I’m attending a workshop at NYU organized by Tyler Shoemaker and Leif Weatherby called “Cultural AI: An Emerging Field.” What is Cultural AI? I’m not sure yet, but this workshop is going to find out. At this point in my career, the invite list is far more important than the planned topic, and this list is top notch. My brief talk will be about the culture of benchmarking in machine learning and how weird it is now that we’re trying to benchmark culture. I’ll let you know what the group synthesizes later this week.

In other exciting news, The Irrational Decision comes out tomorrow! Get it wherever you buy books. You can even get it in one of those atavistic bindings of printed pages wrapped in a pretty dust cover. I hear they look good in the background of your podcast.

I should say something longer about the book, but I want to see how release day moves me. So until tomorrow, here’s what I wrote about it last fall. Technology Review wrote a nice review that companioned it with two other great books, The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits) by Max Kasy and Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI by Carissa Véliz. I need to read both of these. In the interdisciplinary journal Critical AI, Jathan Sadowski further contextualized the book within the broader sphere of science studies.

Finally, for my friends and readers in the Bay Area, the folks at Bloomberg Beta and Reboot are sponsoring a launch event for The Irrational Decision on March 17 in San Francisco. If you’re in the area and interested, you can find more information and register here. Space is limited, but it would be great to meet you in person.