Thomas B

“They said people should have the right to ask for an explanation of algorithmically made decisions.”
― Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

“University of Michigan psychologist Felix Warneken walks across the room, carrying a tall stack of magazines, toward the doors of a closed wooden cabinet. He bumps into the front of the cabinet, exclaims a startled “Oh!,” and backs away. Staring for a moment at the cabinet, he makes a thoughtful “Hmm,” before shuffling forward and bumping the magazines against the cabinet doors again. Again he backs away, defeated, and says, pitiably, “Hmmm . . .” It’s as if he can’t figure out where he’s gone wrong. From the corner of the room, a toddler comes to the rescue. The child walks somewhat unsteadily toward the cabinet, heaves open the doors one by one, then looks up at Warneken with a searching expression, before backing away. Warneken, making a grateful sound, puts his pile of magazines on the shelf.1 Warneken, along with his collaborator Michael Tomasello of Duke, was the first to systematically show, in 2006, that human infants as young as eighteen months old will reliably identify a fellow human facing a problem, will identify the human’s goal and the obstacle in the way, and will spontaneously help if they can—even if their help is not requested, even if the adult doesn’t so much as make eye contact with them, and even when they expect (and receive) no reward for doing so.2”
― Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Tolstoy went on to observe,"This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.
"Washington was a typical American. Naopoleon was a typical Frenchmen, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country--- bigger than all the Presidents t,ogether. We are still too near to his greatness, " Tolstoy concluded, "but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when it's light beams directly on us.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln