[FRIAM] Interview with Jeremy Howard

[jon zingale]

I appreciate Jeremy's /spit and elbow grease/ approach to developing his lab,
his youthful heart/naivety, and the emphasis he places on architecture and
profiling over analytic bounds. His position mostly focuses on the
importance of  "getting up, getting out, and getting something"
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CssC-DY4lO8&ab_channel=OutkastVEVO>   with
respect to AI, though something about his enthusiasm and virtue signaling
gives me pause. Silicon Valley 2.0 is hyper-obsessed with the ethics of
/its/ earlier form, and so there remains something disturbing about /white
men/ continuing the pattern of imperialism under the guise of missionary
work, a mission to serve the /noble savages/. This pattern is by no means
new and to the extent that his desire to help is as authentically quixotic
as he presents, it can likely be remedied with a little self-reflection.
While I continue to hold out for high-level neural network theories, I do
very much appreciate the attempts to remove false barriers to entry. One
tension I feel, when I take a few steps back, is repeated in the very
development of the web and more generally in the euro-centric story of
westward expansion. The former conveys the tribulations of a world now
burdened with Javascript in which we (in the field) scramble to work out
what's next (web assembly?) and determine the meaningful patterns. The
latter is the story of opportunity in the wilderness followed by the
inevitable harness of law (True Grit). If the goal is authenticity wrt
distancing ourselves from Silicon Valley 1.0, I wish to see authentically
new narratives and archetypes.
All that said, I am excited about the work Jeremy and his wife are doing and
I mostly agree that coding is an essential literacy. --trigger warning--
Even if tomorrow the world's computers were to disappear, we would continue
to depend on this literacy.



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