Category: ideas

You know that great American novel you’ve been planning to write? Start now, before the machines take a creative writing class.

Take the project to see if machines could recreate Gaudi’s aesthetic. “They have fed the machine not just hundreds of images of Gaudi’s work, but also contextual images – images of Barcelona, where Gaudi’s most famous work can be found, and other historical and cultural information. The idea is to actually recreate Gaudi’s intelligence, not just his signature style – to create an artificial Gaudi who was inspired the way Gaudi was. In theory, any artist’s brain could be recompiled in this way, and you could consult a virtual Leonardo da Vinci not just about how to draw and paint but about how to invent new flying machines.”

“We’re making decisions that are rational and even pleasurable from an individual point of view, but when everyone in society behaves this way — to cement in their own security, their own mobility — social mobility as a whole goes down, inequality goes up, many measures of segregation go up. And ultimately a bill for this comes due.”

Certainly thinkers were always concerned with what is true, but the word “fact” didn’t come into common use until the 1660s. David Wootton gives us the story, from how the likes of Kepler and Galileo paved the way for the concept to take hold to Hume’s definition of facts (as distinct from “necessary truths”) to how facts changed the idea of authority.

“In the last 15 years, the science of mind wandering has mushroomed as a topic of scholarly study, thanks in part to advances in brain imaging. But for a long time, it was still difficult to see what people’s brains were doing outside the lab. Then, when smartphones came on the scene in the late 2000s, researchers came up with an ingenious approach to understanding just how often the human brain wanders in the wilds of modern life.”

“We still don’t understand how the brain works because we’re still ignorant about the middle ground between single neurons and behavior, which is the function of groups of neurons—of neural circuits.” And that’s because of “the methodological shackles that have prevented investigators from examining the activity of entire nervous system. This is probably futile, like watching TV by examining a single pixel at a time.”

“People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.”

“Though I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it, I was morbidly fascinated by the idea that we might be on the verge of creating a machine that could wipe out the entire species, and by the notion that capitalism’s great philosopher kings—Musk, Thiel, Gates—were so publicly exercised about the Promethean dangers of that ideology’s most cherished ideal. These dire warnings about A.I. were coming from what seemed to be the most unlikely of sources: not from Luddites or religious catastrophists, that is, but from the very people who personify our culture’s reverence for machines.”

“Both of these bizarre events put one in mind of a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers. This idea was, I’m told, put forward first and most forcibly by the N.Y.U. philosopher David Chalmers: what is happening lately, he says, is proof that we are living in a computer simulation and that something has recently gone haywire within it. The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be running our lives are having some kind of breakdown. There’s a glitch, and we are in it.”

“What if I were to say that the very idea of consciousness was invented to explain how you could experience an apple when there is no apple in your head. So we have to have this consciousness apple. However, if experience and apple are one and the same, there is no longer any need to talk of a consciousness separate from it. The apple is more than enough.”