This book was rather disappointing; the title Neural Networks does not accurately portray what the book is actually about. It would have been more helpful with a title such as Neural Networks: A Cultural, Historical, and Biological Appraisal. The book is mainly concerned with the cultural and historical aspects of neural networks, especially from a media theory perspective. This is interesting and obliquely relevant to current issues with neural networks, but it is not really relevant to the current global surge of, and controversies concerning, deep learning and artificial intelligence, with their underpinning structure of neural networks. The last chapter by Lucy Suchman saves the book in this regard.
My second criticism is that the graphical presentation of the book is “very ordinary.” Actually, it is more a booklet; at a mere 112 pages, it could have benefited from at least two more chapters to get to the “heart” of...