This review by Teddy Roland has now been published in Critical AI at this link https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/article/doi/10.1215/2834703X-12096036/406204/Neural-Networks; an extract is pasted in below. If your institution lacks access to Critical AI please encourage them to subscribe. If you are an independent scholar please write to criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
EXCTRACT:
Amid the rising tide of humanities scholarship addressing contemporary artificial intelligence (AI), the multiauthored Neural Networks by Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Théo LePage-Richer, and Lucy Suchman provides an orienting set of coordinates for researchers arriving to the field. Their book is the latest volume in the In Search of Media series from University of Minnesota Press, which describes its goal as moving past a “keywords” approach to media studies and instead offering accounts of the “conditions” beneath new intellectual formations (vii). In a sequence of three chapters, each author presents case studies that articulate the conditions under which “neural” networks—a common term for machine learning architectures with a surprisingly long history—have been understood to solve an urgent scientific problem, ranging from physiology at the turn of the twentieth century to cognitive sciences in the twenty-first. Along the way, the authors offer several theoretical frames that lay the groundwork for further…