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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Thing It Learned from Us: A story about learning, mistakes, and the machines that remember what we teach them

The Thing It Learned from Us: A story about learning, mistakes, and the machines that remember what we teach them

Paperback

General Juvenile NonfictionScience & Nature

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798171168094
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 110
Weight: 0.32
Height: 0.28 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The streetlight on the corner has been out since November. A computer that has never made an arithmetic error says there is nothing there to fix.

It is not lying. Nobody has typed anything wrong. Every number in the system was calculated correctly, and every number says the same thing: that crossing is safe, and it can wait until next year.

Sixty people cross it in the dark every morning on the way to the first shift.

IT ALSO CHANGED ITS MIND

Thirty-one wooden boxes come out of a dead engineer's house, and thirty of them behave. The thirty-first says green on Saturday and red on Thursday, to the same apple, in the same garage, with nobody in the room.

It is not broken. It is not guessing. It is completely certain both times - and working out why takes Ethan, Emma, Noah, Anya, Amara and Kenji eleven days of changing one thing at a time and getting nowhere, until Kenji says the sentence that reorganises everything:

Nothing happened to it. We happened to it.

WHAT THEY HAVE TO DO ABOUT IT

In Book One the evidence was sitting in a computer for eleven years and nobody had thought to look. This time there is no evidence at all. The road has no record of being dangerous because the people who live on it stopped reporting anything years ago - and the reason they stopped is that nothing ever got fixed.

You cannot prove that with the records. The records are what the problem destroyed.

So they knock on sixty-one doors and ask twenty-two households to start reporting faults that have been there since November. Six weeks later the score has moved forty points and the road is exactly as dangerous as it was.

Which proves the thing they suspected, and costs more than they expected, and does not save anybody in time.

WHAT THIS BOOK TEACHES

Four ideas, properly: training and testing - why a system checked against what it learned from will always look excellent and has told you nothing. Overfitting - why forty-three rules can work worse than six. Generalisation - the only thing anybody wants and the hardest thing to measure. And the feedback loop - what happens when a machine's own decisions quietly rewrite the information it will learn from next.

Along the way: ground truth, selection bias, model drift, Goodhart's law, and what it means to train a system on human decisions rather than on facts.

INSIDE

Twenty-eight chapters - fifteen short teaching sections woven through the story - four Case Files - four full-page diagrams - a cumulative glossary of every term across both books - and an intervention the reader can run themselves.

WHO IT IS FOR

Readers of about eleven upward, and the adults who end up reading over their shoulder. No adult in this book explains anything. The children are wrong for a fortnight at a time, one of them is proved right for entirely the wrong reason and says so out loud, and nobody is sacked at the end - because everybody involved did their job correctly.

Book Two of Learn & Explore: Artificial Intelligence. It assumes Book One, The Box That Knew Something, and will not hold without it.

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