Nowadays machine learning models are taking over human decision making on unprecedented scales. And a vast majority of these decisions involve classifications – what sort of thing is this? Are you going in the “high risk” or “low risk” category? And those classifications then set policies on how people are treated.

Humans have been making classifications for as long as there has been intelligence. Psychologists believe that the impulse to categorize is as innate as our capacity for language, because we naturally group the world into concepts in order to reason about it. How are human classifiers and machine classifiers similar, and how are they different? Turns out that machine classifiers can behave in some very non-intuitive ways, and are susceptible to ‘hacking’ or tampering in ways that would never fool a human. How does this translate into how our government, healthcare, and school systems will behave when outsourced to the machines (of major tech companies) at massive scale?

We take an interdisciplinary journey through classification in fields as diverse as biology, music, philosophy, mathematics, library science, – to name a few – and their history.

Scott Hawley is a physicist who never had any use for classification; for him the world was all about “regression” – fitting functions to things. But exposure to machine learning methods made him wonder “why are people so concerned with classification [when regression is ‘real science’]?” He got involved in an interdisciplinary program in Oxford and came to see that people in the humanities were often making judgment calls, classifying topics and concepts, and eventually it dawned on Hawley that classification is so important because it’s what humans do, it is the lifeblood of human society.

On our journey we’ll learn about modern machine classification methods – AI systems using neural networks – through interactive graphical features which are embedded into the eBook.

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One of the other interesting things we see is that people do classification without even really thinking about it. It’s just what we do as embodied intelligence. We use this for information retrieval, for making sense of the world. What are some of the pitfalls of human classification in addition to that of machines? Well it turns out that humans can be pretty bad classifiers too.

Hawley is really an outsider to all of this, and thus makes an interesting set of observations as a foreigner to the world of classification. Like Tocqueville on Americans on Bill Bryon on the Brits, Hawley is writing about the nature of “The Classifiers - Both Human and Machine.”