If You Get Deep Enough, You Get

The Attribution Of Intelligence To Machines, Crowds Of Fragments, Or Other Nerd Deities Obscures More Than It Illuminates. When People Are Told That A Computer Is Intelligent, They Become Prone To Changing Themselves In Order To Make The Computer Appear To Work Better, Instead Of Demanding That The Computer Be Changed To Become More Useful.

Books Are Really, Really Hard To Write. They Represent A Kind Of A Summit Of Grappling With What One Really Has To Say

A Fashionable Idea In Technical Circles Is That Quantity Not Only Turns Into Quality At Some Extreme Of Scale, But Also Does So According To Principles We Already Understand. Some Of My Colleagues Think A Million, Or Perhaps A Billion, Fragmentary Insults Will Eventually Yield Wisdom That Surpasses That Of Any Well-thought-out Essay, So Long As Sophisticated Secret Statistical Algorithms Recombine The Fragments. I Disagree. A Trope From The Early Days Of Computer Science Comes To Mind: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

A File-sharing Service And A Hedge Fund Are Essentially The Same Things. In Both Cases, There's This Idea That Whoever Has The Biggest Computer Can Analyze Everyone Else To Their Advantage And Concentrate Wealth And Power. It's Shrinking The Overall Economy. I Think It's The Mistake Of Our Age.

The Most Important Thing About A Technology Is How It Changes People.