“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” — Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911) I have been thinking about what happens when a machine arrives carrying the answer …
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” — Marilyn Strathern, restating Goodhart in Improving Ratings, 1997 (a sentence I have now tested personally) At 7:26 on the evening of September 29, I took a …
“One authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the second man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.” — Lewis Mumford, Authoritarian and Democratic Technics, 1964 Lately I have been thinking about what my machines can …
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” — Richard Feynman, Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle, 1986 I have been thinking lately about the moment I turn away from an AI …
I am working on a book and have been rereading something I wrote in 2018 as part of the process. The old post is called “Pascal’s AI Wager.” Eight years have turned it into an exam I did not know …
“Learning is not child’s play; we cannot learn without pain.” — Attributed to Aristotle Today is September 11. Twenty-five years have passed since the towers fell, and we are still learning what that morning did to us. Some pain announces …
“Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” — John Culkin, A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan, 1967. The line is nearly always given to McLuhan, and nearly always in a slightly different form than the …
“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it. They will appear wise, but not be so.” — Thamus to the god Theuth, on the invention of writing, in Plato’s Phaedrus Sometime in the …
The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts. –Aristotle Many years ago, during a particularly wayward period of my misspent youth (i.e.: my cowboy period), having pulled a calf from …
You cannot win a bet on a future impossible to predict. You can only become a human who survives regardless of outcome. Three AI fears walk into a bar. The first tries to order everything on the menu at once …