“Literature, art, philosophy, music, all the arts, in fact, are taught in parallel with one another and their historical context. In contrast, the science at the heart of A.I. is disconnected from any context, as if the theories and math that underpin the field are entirely abstract, unassailable truths. But if we are to understand algorithms, we have to acknowledge the assumptions deep within them that were influenced by the time and place in which they were created. “
— Rage Inside the Machine, Robert Elliott Smith
(Published in 2019 by Bloomsbury, and shortlisted for the UK’s Best Business Book of the Year)
Dr. Smith’s training is in
engineering science,
complexity science, AI and evolutionary algorithms. His scientific research has been cited widely and has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals including Scientific Reports, Economics, Critical Review, Social Networks, Evolutionary Computation, and New Mathematics & Natural Computation.
He has also contributed opinion pieces, essays and critiques on A.I. and technology to business magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian, USAToday and The Big Issue. In 2015, he contributed to UCL’s written evidence to the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Algorithms in Decision Making.
Previously, Dr. Smith was the Associate Editor of The Journal of Evolutionary Computation (1996-2017), and the Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (1993-1996).
“Rob Smith has written an important book that looks at AI in a careful and balanced way, combining wit and scholarship. Quoting George Box 'All models are wrong, but some are useful’ he succeeds in presenting us with the societal challenges that algorithms present when they are embedded in human systems but eschews easy solutions. His analysis treads the delicate line between righteous indignation and recognition of the scale of the technical achievements. I learnt a lot.”
— Anthony Finkelstein CBe FREng,
Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security to UK Government
Dr. Smith primarily blogs at the Rage website, but some older blog posts are available here.