A

“The emerging cash economy of al-Andalus contrasted with the subsistence economies of Frankish Europe and Christian Iberia, where rural servility remained the norm, social mobility was low, and there was little by way of urban culture, infrastructure, or currency. Christian rulers collected revenue through the direct consumption of food surpluses, forcing them to continuously circulate through their lands with their households in tow. This itinerant lifestyle prevented them from accumulating easily transferrable wealth, and from developing secular institutions and bureaucracies.”
― Brian Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain

“More broadly, formal logic of the sort we have been talking about does only one thing well: it allows us to take knowledge of which we are certain and apply rules that are always valid to deduce new knowledge of which we are also certain.”
― Gary F. Marcus, Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

“But the real story is how narrow Duplex was. For all the fantastic resources of Google (and its parent company, Alphabet), the system that they created was so narrow it could handle just three things: restaurant reservations, hair salon appointments, and the opening hours of a few selected businesses. By the time the demo was publicly released, on Android phones, even the hair salon appointments and the opening hour queries were gone. Some of the world’s best minds in AI, using some of the biggest clusters of computers in the world, had produced a special-purpose gadget for making nothing but restaurant reservations. It doesn’t get narrower than that.”
― Gary F. Marcus, Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

“No army, no matter how clean its reputation, walked away from war untainted. And no leader, no matter how noble, could help but sink into the crem when he stepped into the game of conquest.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Rhythm of War