More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
But that was the thing about anger—once you got organized around it, it could never be satisfied.
In a fragile world of convulsive poverty, conflict, and environmental catastrophe, there was only one way for humanity to survive: to create, to build, to surpass.
Bosch had just given away a key part of his own psychology. He was one of those leaders who liked to have the issue debated in front of them, portraying himself as the dispassionate judge, when he had likely already made a decision.
never made it across the proverbial ‘Valley of Death’ in contracting, from prototype to program of record.
A burn-in is defined as ‘the continuous operation of a device, such as a computer, as a test for defects or failure prior to putting it to use,’” answered the machine.
Think of it not as artificial intelligence but augmented intelligence.
Automation had always seemed a problem just for truck drivers or factory workers, until suddenly it wasn’t.23 It turned out that not even a Yale Law degree could compete with the algorithms.
gallium would transform the hard metal of its insides into sheets as delicate as a saltine cracker.
John McCarthy first coined the term ‘artificial intelligence’ to describe the strange idea of a computer becoming a thinking machine, even when they were little more than wall-sized calculators.
The real turning point was when an AI won at Go.
That’s just what ‘they’ want you to believe. In a world of likes and shares, the truth is whatever we make it.”
Scientia Est Potentia, Latin for “Knowledge Is Power.” Like so much else, they’d actually gotten it wrong. Back in 1655, Hobbes had explained the true intent of the translation: “The end of knowledge is power . . . Lastly, the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action, or thing to be done.”
“If you gather enough information, everything can be linked to together. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out what links actually matter and what else is just random noise,”
‘I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish
...more
Society is simply a design problem.”
‘When faced with the same situation in combat, never do the same thing.’”
A big part of it was that while an AI could beat a chess master, the AI turned out to be unable to beat an ordinary player working with an AI.”
Also mentioned in Range by Epstein
Without ever deciding, without ever thinking it through, we grew to trust machines that we don’t even understand to run our adult lives. We grant unexplainable black boxes of code the power to make all the decisions that should matter for us.
to aid broader engagement with the thorny issues related to technology and society that will soon become all too real. In the past we’ve termed this approach as the concept of “useful fiction.”
P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
