2020 reading list + NLP experiment

Oct 08, 2020 | 1 min read
Books NLP

“So, what have you been reading lately?”, asked GPT-3 to a human.

Earlier this year, I challenged myself to read at least 10 books, and promptly signed up for the Goodreads challenge.

10 might seem like a modest number to the more seasoned bookworms out there but it’s really not for someone like me who has fallen out of the habit. Now is the time, more than ever, when we need the antidote to the shallow, recycled, and clickbait infested pockets of the internet.

In no particular order here are my picks for this year:

Non-fiction

  1. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
  2. Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
  3. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark
  4. Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime by Sean Caroll
  5. On Creativity by David Bohm
  6. Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Fiction

  1. Dune by Frank Herbert
  2. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
  3. Neuromancer by William Gibson
  4. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Now for the experiment — After finishing each of these illustrious titles, I would train a language model to see if my (now slightly altered) worldview concurs with the latent space that contains a fuzzy mixure of concepts from these books. A model of my literary pursuits in the year 2020, if you will.