You Look Like a Thing and I Love You

This book contains tables, charts, and illustrations in the form of a PDF file that you can download from the audiobook page on the website after purchasing it.

Maybe you’re a triangle? Because only you here are worth something.

Flirt is not the strongest suit of modern artificial intelligence (AI). Inside it, so many strange and complicated processes happen that sometimes the only way to find out what the AI understood—and where it’s terribly wrong—is to analyze its output data.

Author Janelle Shane spent a great deal of time on this to figure out:

• what can be called AI and what can’t;

• what it’s good at and what it is doomed to fail at for many years;

• why the AI of the future will probably resemble a swarm of insects;

• how smart it really is;

• why AI can also “get nervous.”

All these questions will help us understand how artificial intelligence works, how it “thinks,” and why it makes our world even more incomprehensible.

Janelle Shane has a PhD degree in electrical engineering and a Master’s degree in physics. On the site aiweirdness.com she writes about AI, as well as funny and sometimes very worrying cases where algorithms misunderstand people. Her texts have been published in New York Times, Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Popular Science, and other popular American outlets.