Everyday Chaos Quotes

“After just three days, the system so mastered the game that it was able to beat the prior version of AlphaGo a hundred games out of a hundred.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“For example, Deep Patient looked at five hundred factors for each of the hundreds of thousands of patients”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“in this way, artificial neural networks are like the brain’s very real neural network. These networks can be insanely complicated.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“the introduction, we talked about Deep Patient, a machine learning system that researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York fed hundreds of pieces of medical data about seven hundred thousand patients. As a result, it was able to predict the onset of diseases that have defied human diagnostic abilities. Likewise, a Google research project analyzed the hospital health records of 216,221 adults. From the forty-six billion data points, it was able to predict the length of a patient’s stay in the hospital, the probability that the patient would exit alive, and more.41”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“Volunteers transcribed sixty thousand words—the length of a short book—from old manuscripts to create what in machine learning language is called ground truth:”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“On the other hand, Clairaut reported that Lepaute exhibited an “ardor” that was “surprising”—perhaps surprising to him because Lepaute was a woman; he later removed the acknowledgment of Lepaute’s considerable contribution from the published text. (Much of her later work was published without attribution by other people, including her husband, France’s royal clockmaker.)”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“For three thousand years, the Egyptians held to a cyclical view that year after year proved itself to be true: the seasons came and went, life in the farms and villages remained basically the same, and the idea of progress was as foreign as soft-serve ice cream.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“how we predict shows us how we think the future happens and thus how the world works.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“But for the want of a nail, a kingdom was lost”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“AI in the form of machine learning, and especially deep learning, is letting us benefit from data we used to exclude as too vast, messy, and trivial.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“The mall owes its existence to Level II complexity: malls weren’t feasible before there were cars, yet you could not predict their rise just by examining a car.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“We don’t use these technologies because they are huge, connected, and complex. We use them because they work.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“In fact, it’s entirely plausible that the factors affecting people’s preferences are microscopic and fleeting.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“Evolution has given us minds tuned for survival and only incidentally for truth.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“Our newly capacious machines can get closer to understanding it than we can, and they, as machines, don’t really understand anything at all.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“Yet about an AlphaGo move that left some commenters literally speechless, one go master, Fan Hui, said, “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move.” Then, softly, “So beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility