Reflecting on Paradise Lost via Reinforcement Learning and Resistance AI Literature

Abstract

It is perfectly reasonable to ask why I am examining reinforcement learning through the eyes of John Milton, a dead white male poet and his magnum opus, Paradise Lost, which Sir Walter Raleigh called “a monument to dead ideas” . If the proposition to draw parallels between Machine Learning, and a 350 year-old poem seems outlandish, you are in good company. When I discussed this with other ML researchers, they listened mostly out of politeness. But this is not unchartered territory. Pearl and Mackenzie use the story of Adam and Eve to introduce causal learning . In my musings, a work in progress, I hope to compare Paradise Lost to reinforcement learning, and reflect Milton’s resistance through resistance AI literature.