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June 13 - August 4, 2020
In 1988, the roboticist Hans Moravec wrote, “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”
The technology for automatic elevators had existed since 1900, but people were too uncomfortable to ride in one without an operator. It took the 1945 strike and a huge industry PR push to change people’s minds, a process that is already repeating with driverless cars. The cycle of automation, fear, and eventual acceptance goes on.
Machines that replace physical labor have allowed us to focus more on what makes us human: our minds. Intelligent machines will continue that process, taking over the more menial aspects of cognition and elevating our mental lives toward creativity, curiosity, beauty, and joy. These are what truly make us human, not any particular activity or skill like swinging a hammer—or even playing chess.
Focusing on your strengths is required for peak performance, but improving your weaknesses has the potential for the greatest gains. This is true for athletes, executives, and entire companies. Leaving your comfort zone involves risk, however, and when you are already doing well the temptation to stick with the status quo can be overwhelming, leading to stagnation.
In nearly any competitive endeavor, you have to be damned good before luck can be of any use to you at all.
Will we help shape the future and set the terms of our relationship with new technology or will we let others force the terms on us?
This sort of thinking is a trap into which every generation falls when it comes to machine intelligence. We confuse performance—the ability of a machine to replicate or surpass the results of a human—with method, how those results are achieved.
Brains grown in petri dishes from stem cells are interesting for experiments, but without any input or output they could never be called minds.
a minimax system evaluates possibilities and sorts them from best to worst.
Even the most disciplined human mind wanders in the heat of competition. This is both a weakness and a strength of human cognition. Sometimes these undisciplined wanderings only weaken your analysis. Other times they lead to inspiration, to beautiful or paradoxical moves that were not on your initial list of candidates.
Romanticizing the loss of jobs to technology is little better than complaining that antibiotics put too many grave diggers out of work.
If we feel like we are being surpassed by our own technology it’s because we aren’t pushing ourselves hard enough, aren’t being ambitious enough in our goals and dreams. Instead of worrying about what machines can do, we should worry more about what they still cannot do.
AI products tend to evolve from laughably weak to interesting but feeble, then to artificial but useful, and finally to transcendent and superior to human.
I’m fond of citing Pablo Picasso, who said in an interview, “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” An answer means an end, a full stop, and to Picasso there was never an end, only new questions to explore.
To become good at anything you have to know how to apply basic principles. To become great at it, you have to know when to violate those principles.
the victor is the one who makes the next to last mistake
hard work is a talent. The ability to push yourself, to keep working, practicing, studying more than others is itself a talent. If anyone could do it, everyone would. As with any talent, it must be cultivated to blossom.
The human need to understand things as a story instead of as a series of discrete events can lead to many flawed conclusions. We are easily drawn away from the data by a nice anecdote that fits our preconceived notions or that fulfills one of the popular tropes. This is how urban legends propagate so efficiently; the best ones tell us something we really want to believe is true.
The highest art of the chess player lies in not allowing your opponent to show you what he can do.”
A couple of small slights and hassles could be nothing, but when they form a pattern it is cause for concern.
As Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids, number 3 says in Gravity’s Rainbow, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”
New York Times columnist David Brooks reacted to the Wired article with a droll account of how he was giving in to the outsourced brain. “I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. …” Continuing, “You may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. … It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.
The danger isn’t intellectual stagnation or an addiction to instant fact-finding missions. The real risk is substituting superficial knowledge for the type of understanding and insight that is required to create new things.
A match is not a test of one’s absolute ability to play chess—whatever that is—but of how well one has played those particular games. Therefore, the ability to monitor and control one’s mood is of great importance in determining the match outcome.”
Intuition is the product of experience and confidence. And here I mean “product” in the mathematical sense, as the equation intuition = experience x confidence. It is the ability to act reflexively on knowledge that has been deeply absorbed and understood.
weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.
Chess is the perfect example of Larry Tesler’s “AI effect,” which says that “intelligence is whatever machines haven’t done yet.”
