Category: ideas

“Artificial intelligence researchers have taught computers to play a wide range of strategic games well enough to compete with skilful human players – and in a few cases, they’ve beaten them convincingly…”

“Where do fictional characters ‘live’? “That is, when you’re not reading them on the page or watching them on the screen? Do they go back to a design document? Are they stuck in a sketchbook? Do they lumber around your subconscious? When nobody’s thinking about them, do they vanish, until a trade paperback or a lost film reel brings them back to mind?”

“Why do we inflict pain for no gain? On the face of it, it is rather a perverse way of going about things. Does spitefulness stem from an affronted sense of fairness? Or something altogether darker: envy, lust for revenge – or perhaps even pure sadism? It might be all those things. Economists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have been teasing out how, used judiciously, spiteful behaviour can be one of our best weapons in maintaining a fair and ordered society.”

“Perhaps not coincidentally, the rise of figurine-carving modern human cultures in Europe coincided with the decline of Neanderthals. Some anthropologists suspect that humans of the era experienced a leap in mental abilities, fueled by random genetic mutation or the neurological nourishment of language and culture.”

“Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame – yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. ‘He didn’t die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer,'” said a researcher.

Thanks to search engines, “[t]rue understanding (or skill or effort) has become bothersome – an unnecessary headache that impedes our ability to get on with our lives (and most likely skip to something else). Earning the endgame seems so yesterday, especially when we can know whatever we need to know whenever we need to know it.”

“For decades, psychologists have focussed on raw intelligence as the most important variable when it comes to predicting success in life. [Columbia University professor of psychology Walter] Mischel argues that intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to do their homework.”

Malcolm Gladwell: “David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years … in which one side was at least ten times as powerful – in terms of armed might and population – as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.”

Whenever the Christian calendar approaches a millennium, a certain set of people begin to expect the end of the world. “[Z]ealous forms of religion [spring up] – the sort of religion that thrives when people see little virtue in marrying, breeding or building up private property.” And the sort of religion of which the canny and powerful can take advantage.

The idea behind Darpa’s latest venture, called “Physical Intelligence” (PI) is to prove, mathematically, that the human mind is nothing more than parts and energy. In other words, all brain activities — reasoning, emoting, processing sights and smells — derive from physical mechanisms at work, acting according to the principles of “thermodynamics in open systems.”