Stephen Hawking

289 results back to index


pages: 209 words: 68,587

Stephen Hawking by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Michelson, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, do what you love, Ernest Rutherford, Eyjafjallajökull, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Nelson Mandela, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

A Note on Sources I based this book upon my own experiences, supplemented with interviews with fifteen of Stephen’s close friends, carers, and colleagues, each lasting from ninety minutes to eight hours: Sam Blackburn, Bernard Carr, Judith Croasdell, Robert Donovan, Diana Finn, Peter Guzzardi, James Hartle, Elaine Hawking, Don Page, Martin Rees, Vivian Richer, Erhard Seiler, Kip Thorne, Neil Turok, and Radka Visnakova. I also drew background material from two biographies: Kitty Ferguson, Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work (London: Transworld, 2011), and Michael White and John Gribbin, Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (New York: Pegasus, 2016). For some of the details of Stephen’s life in the 1970s and ’80s, I looked to Jane Hawking, Music to Move the Stars (London: Pan, 2000), and Kip Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps (New York: Norton, 1994). Finally, I also gleaned a few details from David H. Abramson, “Saving Stephen Hawking,” Harvard Magazine (May 9, 2018); Judy Bachrach, “A Beautiful Mind, an Ugly Possibility,” Vanity Fair (June 2004); and Bernard Carr, “Stephen Hawking: Recollections of a Singular Friend,” Paradigm Explorer (2018/1), 9–13.

ALSO BY LEONARD MLODINOW Elastic: Unlocking Your Brain’s Ability to Embrace Change The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra) The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking) The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives A Briefer History of Time (with Stephen Hawking) Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace FOR CHILDREN (WITH MATT COSTELLO) The Last Dinosaur Titanic Cat This is a work of nonfiction, but the names of certain individuals as well as identifying descriptive details concerning them have been changed to protect their privacy.

Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, there was always the chance that it would be quenched by a stray puff of air. Though an accurate headline describing A Brief History of Time would have been something modest, like Leading Physicist Explains His Theories, that’s not the way the book and its author were described in the media. In the media, Stephen Hawking, the man who couldn’t move, was called Master of the Universe. Of Stephen Hawking the atheist, it was declared that Courageous Physicist Knows the Mind of God. The inflated headlines were merely the media marketing its own articles. It’s a business in which an academic paper reporting that the sun will explode into red giant status in five billion years might be announced with the headline Scientists Say World Coming to an End.


pages: 86 words: 14,764

Free-Range Chickens by Simon Rich

Saturday Night Live, Stephen Hawking

God bless you, The President An interview with Stephen Hawking REPORTER: I just want to start off by saying what a huge fan I am. STEPHEN HAWKING: Thank you so much. REPORTER: How does it feel to know that your seminal work, A Brief History of Time, has sold over two million copies worldwide? STEPHEN HAWKING: It’s an incredible honor. I’m still shocked, to be honest, that it was published in the first place. It isn’t very often that I Love Lucy fan fiction makes its way onto the shelves. REPORTER: I’m sorry…did you say “I Love Lucy fan fiction”? STEPHEN HAWKING: Yes, that’s what my book is: a series of stories that I wrote using the characters from I Love Lucy.

They travel around the world together, having zany adventures. REPORTER: I thought it was about astrophysics. Like…black holes. STEPHEN HAWKING: That’s only the first three chapters. In the middle of chapter four the narrative spirals off into I Love Lucy fan fiction and stays there for the remainder of the book. REPORTER: Really? STEPHEN HAWKING: Yes. I must say, I’m pretty surprised you didn’t notice. It’s almost as if you started to read my book, got bored, and then quit after just a few pages. REPORTER:… STEPHEN HAWKING: Oh my God. That’s what happened, isn’t it? You bought my book, because you wanted to look smart, but you never even read past page fifty!

Contents Title Page Dedication Author’s note I GROWING UP Terrifying childhood experiences When I lost my first tooth A conversation between the people who hid in my closet every night when I was seven If adults were subjected to the same indignities as children My top secret seventh-grade diary Frogs Middle-school telephone conversation Bar mitzvah Inside the cartridge: Duck Hunt Deal with God What I imagined the people around me were saying when I was… How my mother imagined the police Ninth-grade experiments II GOING TO WORK Choose your own adventure Actor’s nightmare Demands Gotham City Hall World’s oldest profession Worst nightmare The only e-mails I could receive that would justify the frequency with which I check my e-mail An interview with Stephen Hawking The final moments of the Titanic Acupuncture school III DAILY LIFE The official rules of boxing Secret Service Logic problems Time machine Amusement Opium wars Marathon All-you-can-eat buffet fantasy The eleventh hour Next move IV RELATIONSHIPS Match.com profile Donors needed Summers abroad Being of sound mind Moses I think my teenaged daughter knows I read her diary Last Supper What I want my tombstone to say when I die of encephalitis next week Thor’s Day V ANIMALS Free-range chickens Dalmatians Lab study Herbert Hoover Prehistoric life VI GOD Everything happens for a reason Intelligent design Why do bad things happen to good people?


pages: 634 words: 185,116

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

Hawking was the only one who knew where the restaurant was, but speaking through his voice synthesizer is a slow process; we spent several tense moments stopped in the middle of a busy road while Hawking explained that we had passed the restaurant and would have to turn around. Figure 58: Stephen Hawking, who gave us the most important clue we have about the relationship between quantum mechanics, gravity, and entropy. Stephen Hawking has been able to accomplish remarkable things while working under extraordinary handicaps, and the reason is basically straightforward: He refuses to compromise in any way. He’s not going to cut down his travel schedule, or eat at the wrong restaurant, or drink a lesser quality of tea, or curtail his wicked sense of humor, or think less ambitiously about the inner workings of the universe, merely because he is confined to a wheelchair.

Very roughly speaking, physicists who come from a background in general relativity (including Stephen Hawking) have tended to believe that information really is lost, and that black hole evaporation represents a breakdown of the conventional rules of quantum mechanics; meanwhile, those from a background in particle physics and quantum field theory have tended to believe that a better understanding would show that the information was somehow preserved. In 1997, Hawking and fellow general-relativist Kip Thorne made a bet with John Preskill, a particle theorist from Caltech. It read as follows: Whereas Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne firmly believe that information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden from the outside universe, and can never be revealed even as the black hole evaporates and completely disappears, And whereas John Preskill firmly believes that a mechanism for the information to be released by the evaporating black hole must and will be found in the correct theory of quantum gravity, Therefore Preskill offers, and Hawking/Thorne accept, a wager that: When an initial pure quantum state undergoes gravitational collapse to form a black hole, the final state at the end of black hole evaporation will always be a pure quantum state.

Image on page 53 by the NASA/WMAP Science Team. Photograph on page 67 courtesy of Corbis Images. Image on page 119 courtesy of Getty Images. Figures on pages 147, 153, 177, 213, 270, 379, and 382 by Sean Carroll. Photograph on page 204 courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Photograph on page 259 courtesy of Professor Stephen Hawking. Photograph on page 267 courtesy of Professor Jacob Bekenstein. Photograph on page 295 by Jerry Bauer, from Wikimedia Commons. Photograph on page 315 courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All other images courtesy of Jason Torchinsky. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Carroll, Sean M., 1966- From eternity to here : the quest for the ultimate theory of time / Sean Carroll.


pages: 444 words: 111,837

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

Let us return to a black hole’s event horizon, this strange one-way door out of our region of space, because scientists encountered here the strangest incarnation of the laws of thermodynamics. The story of how this was discovered begins with one of the few people in history who exceeds the hype that surrounds him, Stephen Hawking. * * * In the summer of 1962, a healthy young student sat before a board of examiners at Oxford University. Twenty years old, Stephen Hawking was about to receive his undergraduate degree. As his physics tutor at the time said of the examiners, “They were intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far cleverer than most of themselves.” Shortly after, Hawking moved from Oxford to Cambridge to pursue his PhD, and he would remain there for the rest of his life.

Willard Gibbs, vols. 1 and 2 The Second Physicist: On the History of Theoretical Physics in Germany by Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach Willard Gibbs by Muriel Rukeyser Part Three: The Consequences of Thermodynamics—Chapters Thirteen to Nineteen Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges Alan Turing: The Enigma Man by Nigel Cawthorne Alan Turing: The Life of a Genius by Dermot Turing The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safer for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy by Kip S. Thorne A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking The Bumpy Road: Max Planck from Radiation Theory to the Quantum, 1896–1906 by Massimiliano Badino Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson Einstein and the Quantum: The Quest of the Valiant Swabian by A.

Brush Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar Quantum Profiles by Jeremy Bernstein 17 Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart Significant Figures: Lives and Works of Trailblazing Mathematicians by Ian Stewart Sketch of Thermodynamics by Peter Guthrie Tate Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work by Kitty Ferguson Stephen Hawking’s Universe: An Introduction to the Most Remarkable Scientist of Our Time by John Boslough A Student’s Guide to Einstein’s Major Papers by Robert E. Kennedy Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe by Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill The Theory of Relativity and Other Essays by Albert Einstein Three Degrees above Zero by Jeremy Bernstein The Turing Guide by B.


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Surviving AI is a first-class introduction to all of this. Brad Feld, co-founder Techstars The promises and perils of machine superintelligence are much debated nowadays. But between the complex and sometimes esoteric writings of AI theorists and academics like Nick Bostrom, and the popular-press prognostications of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, there is something of a gap. Calum Chace’s Surviving AI bridges that gap perfectly. It provides a compact yet rigorous guide to all the major arguments and issues in the field. An excellent resource for those who are new to this topic. John Danaher, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) Calum Chace strikes a note of clarity and balance in the important and often divisive dialogue around the benefits and potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

Perhaps they will never decide to revise their goals. But given their startling progress to date and the weakness of the a priori arguments that conscious machines cannot be created (which we will review in chapter 4), it seems unwise to bet too heavily on it. A lot of people were surprised when Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk said in 2014 that the future of artificial intelligence was something to be concerned about. Both men applauded the achievements of AI research, and the benefits it has delivered. They went on to ask what will happen if and when computers become smarter than people, and we find that we have created a super-intelligence.

Stuart Russell is a British computer scientist and AI researcher who is, along with Peter Norvig, a director of research at Google, co-author of one of the field’s standard university textbooks, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach”. Russell was one of the co-authors of the Huffington Post article in April 2014 which propelled Stephen Hawking into the limelight as a leading proponent of the idea that much more work is needed to ensure that AGI is friendly toward humans. Nils Nilsson is one of the founders of the science of artificial intelligence, and has been on the faculty of Stanford’s Computer Science department since 1985. He was a founding fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and its fourth president.


pages: 331 words: 47,993

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind by Susan Schneider

artificial general intelligence, brain emulation, deep learning, Elon Musk, Extropian, heat death of the universe, hive mind, life extension, megastructure, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Garreau, J. 2005. Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human. New York: Doubleday. Guardian, The. 2013. “Stephen Hawking: Brain Could Exist Outside Body,” The Guardian, September 21, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/21/stephen-hawking-brain-outside-body. Giles, M. 2018. “The World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer Is Tailor Made for the AI Era,” MIT Technology Review, June 8, 2018. Graham, D. W., ed. 2010. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics.

In the long term, the tables may turn on humans, and the problem may not be what we could do to harm AIs, but what AI might do to harm us. Indeed, some suspect that synthetic intelligence will be the next phase in the evolution of intelligence on Earth. You and I, how we live and experience the world right now, are just an intermediate step to AI, a rung on the evolutionary ladder. For instance, Stephen Hawking, Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk, Max Tegmark, Bill Gates, and many others have raised “the control problem,” the problem of how humans can control their own AI creations, if the AIs outsmart us.2 Suppose we create an AI that has human-level intelligence. With self-improvement algorithms, and with rapid computations, it could quickly discover ways to become vastly smarter than us, becoming a superintelligence—that is, an AI that outthinks us in every domain.

A clever machine could bypass safeguards, such as kill switches, and could potentially pose an existential threat to biological life. The control problem is a serious problem—perhaps it is even insurmountable. Indeed, upon reading Bostrom’s compelling book on the control problem, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers and Strategies,6 scientists and business leaders such as Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates were widely reported by the world media as commenting that superintelligent AI could threaten the human race. At this time, millions of dollars are pouring into organizations devoted to AI safety and some of the finest minds in computer science are working on the problem. Let us consider the implications of the control problem for the SETI project.


pages: 310 words: 89,838

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

The Allied and Axis powers both knew that with the right expertise it was possible to create a chain reaction and release an enormous amount of energy from countless atoms in one devastating blast. Paul Dirac spent the war years at Cambridge as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the job that Isaac Newton had held more than 250 years earlier and that Stephen Hawking would assume 40 years later. Dirac worked briefly on confidential techniques to make weapons-grade uranium, which fed into the Manhattan Project, the U.S. atomic bomb effort led by Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Dirac mostly avoided military research, though, instead grappling with the challenges of being an academic at Cambridge.

Higgs was wary of the perceived privilege of Oxbridge and those who went there, and Dirac was notoriously taciturn, to the point that scholars have speculated that he might have been autistic. It made many of his relationships awkward, and he didn’t often take on Ph.D. students. When he did, overseeing their work was a chore, and he rarely expressed much interest in their progress. One young physicist, Dennis Sciama, who in later life supervised the British cosmologists Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, was briefly Dirac’s Ph.D. student and experienced the effects of his temperament after having a bright idea about the cosmos. Sciama hurried along to his supervisor’s office and knocked on the door. When Sciama was called in, he said: “Professor Dirac, I’ve just thought of a way of relating the formation of stars to cosmological questions, shall I tell you about it?”

By now, the General Accounting Office was estimating that the final cost of the SSC would reach $11 billion. In September 1993, a distinguished delegation of physicists, including Steven Weinberg, Burton Richter, and Leon Lederman, left their labs and offices for George Washington University to promote the supercollider. Prominent British physicist Stephen Hawking sent his own message of support via videotape. They hoped for widespread media coverage, but the story sank beneath the main news of the day: Clinton had brought the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat together to sign the Oslo peace accords. A month later, Congress was scheduled to vote again on Big Science projects.


pages: 76 words: 16,007

Ant Farm and Other Desperate Situations by Simon Rich

nuclear winter, Stephen Hawking

SAM: What’s the point? Some bear would find a way. where are all the time travelers? Stephen Hawking once said, “If time travel is real, where are all the time travelers?” Everyone I talk to thinks this is such a great quote and that it proves that time travel is just a fantasy. But what people are forgetting is that Stephen Hawking is obviously a time traveler. Think about it. “If time travel is real, where are all the time travelers?” That is exactly the kind of thing a time traveler would say. Everyone’s like “Oh, Stephen Hawking, you’re so smart, of course there’s no such thing as time travel!” Meanwhile, Hawking is probably at the dog track right now winning trifecta after trifecta.

Then you would politely excuse yourself, call a bookie, and bet on Duke to defeat UNLV in the 1991 NCAA semifinals, even though they were eleven-point underdogs. Where are all the time travelers? They’re on Wall Street, smoking Cuban cigars and laughing so hard that tears are streaming down their fat faces. Meanwhile, we’re sitting around like morons, betting our money on random dogs and horses and talking about how smart Stephen Hawking is. He probably didn’t even write his books! If you could magically travel through time, think about how easy it would be to bring back some smart book from the future, retype it, and pass it off as your own. The following people are also probably time travelers: the woman who married Bill Gates before he invented Microsoft the guy who just happened to be filming JFK when he got assassinated George Foreman (how else would he know to sponsor that grill?)


pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

For all three trade-offs, jurisdictions will have to weigh both sides of the trade and design policies that are most aligned with their overall strategy and the preferences of their citizenry. Notes Chapter 2 1. Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, and Frank Wilczek, “Stephen Hawking: “Transcedence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence—But Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?” The Independent, May 1, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-9313474.html. 2. Paul Mozur, “Beijing Wants A.I. to Be Made in China by 2030,” New York Times, July 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/business/china-artificial-intelligence.html?

Chris Weller, “One of the Biggest VCs in Silicon Valley Is Launching an Experiment That Will Give 3000 People Free Money Until 2022,” Business Insider, September 21, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-basic-income-test-2017-9. 3. Stephen Hawking, “This Is the Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet,” The Guardian, December 1, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/01/stephen-hawking-dangerous-time-planet-inequality. 4. “The Onrushing Wave,” The Economist, January 18, 2014, https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less. 5.

Some technology CEOs experienced their AI moment when they read the headline in January 2014 that Google had just paid more than $600 million to acquire UK-based DeepMind, even though the startup had generated negligible revenue relative to the purchase price but had demonstrated that its AI had learned—on its own, without being programmed—to play certain Atari video games with superhuman performance. Some regular citizens experienced their AI moment later that year when renowned physicist Stephen Hawking emphatically explained, “[E]verything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence … [S]uccess in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.”1 Others experienced their AI moment the first time they took their hands off the wheel of a speeding Tesla, navigating traffic using Autopilot AI.


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Other times they are fearful and dystopian. And this dichotomy is puzzling. The experts on these various topics, all intelligent and informed people, make predictions about the future that are not just a little different, but that are dramatically different and diametrically opposed to each other. So, why do Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates fear artificial intelligence (AI) and express concern that it may be a threat to humanity’s survival in the near future? And yet, why do an equally illustrious group, including Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Ng, and Pedro Domingos, find this viewpoint so farfetched as to be hardly even worth a rebuttal?

Marvin Minsky, who was an AI researcher for over half a century and truly one of the giants in the field, often referred to humans as “meat machines.” He meant it literally. Ray Kurzweil longs for the day he can back up his “mind file” onto a computer, to be restored if he has an untimely death. Stephen Hawking said it plainly: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” The list goes on and on. To many, this is the inescapable conclusion of a reductionist view of the world.

But for this scenario to happen, by definition, it will also have to be a time of immense economic growth. If we build machines to do just about everything, we will have done so only if the machines are cheaper and better than workers. So if we all lose our jobs to machines, it would by definition be in a world in which GNP is skyrocketing. But there is a concern. Stephen Hawking said it well: Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. What is likely to happen? What if the world bifurcates into the extremely rich machine owners and the rest of us, the 99.9 percent who are now unemployed, broke, and more than a bit PO’ed about the whole sorry state of affairs?


pages: 198 words: 57,703

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

In some ways, as I will explain, this is the situation we have in physics right now. We are currently at a moment in history when many physicists see, if not a crisis in the subject, then at least the building up of a head of steam. It feels as though something has to give. A few decades ago, prominent physicists such as Stephen Hawking were asking, ‘Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?’2 with a ‘theory of everything’ potentially just around the corner. They said it was just a matter of dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s. But they were wrong, and not for the first time. Physicists had expressed similar sentiments towards the end of the nineteenth century; then along came an explosion of new discoveries (the electron, radioactivity, and X-rays) that couldn’t be explained by the physics known at the time and which ushered in the birth of modern physics.

CHAPTER 2 SCALE Unlike philosophy, logic, or pure mathematics, physics is both an empirical and a quantitative science.1 It relies on the testing and verification of ideas through reproducible observation, measurement, and experimentation. While physicists can sometimes propose exotic or outlandish mathematical theories, the only true measure of their efficacy and power is whether they describe phenomena in the real world against which we can test them. This is why Stephen Hawking never won a Nobel Prize for his work in the mid-1970s on the way black holes radiate energy, a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation: the Nobel is only awarded to theories or discoveries that have been confirmed experimentally. Likewise, Peter Higgs and others who made a similar prediction had to wait half a century for the existence of the Higgs boson to be confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider.

Today, physics has given us a demystified explanation of how the universe began, with overwhelming observational evidence to back it up. But did the Big Bang itself have a cause? Was there something that triggered the birth of our universe in the first place? The simplest answer is that there was no ‘before’ the Big Bang, for it marked the birth of both space and time. An idea put forward by Stephen Hawking and James Hartle, called the ‘no boundary’ proposal, states that, as we wind back the clock closer and closer to the Big Bang, time begins to lose its meaning and becomes more like a dimension of space. We therefore end up with smooth four-dimensional space at a point of the universe’s origin.


pages: 186 words: 64,267

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apple Newton, Arthur Eddington, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Brownian motion, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

ALSO BY STEPHEN HAWKING A Briefer History of Time Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays The Illustrated A Brief History of Time The Universe in a Nutshell The Grand Design FOR CHILDREN George’s Secret Key to the Universe (with Lucy Hawking) George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt (with Lucy Hawking) A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME A Bantam Book Publishing History Bantam illustrated hardcover edition published November 1996 Bantam hardcover edition/September 1998 Bantam trade paperback edition/September 1998 All rights reserved. Copyright © 1988, 1996 by Stephen Hawking Illustrations copyright © 1988 by Ron Miller BOOK DESIGN BY GLEN M.

My assistants have been Colin Williams, David Thomas, and Raymond Laflamme, Nick Phillips, Andrew Dunn, Stuart Jamieson, Jonathan Brenchley, Tim Hunt, Simon Gill, Jon Rogers, and Tom Kendall. They, my nurses, colleagues, friends, and family have enabled me to live a very full life and to pursue my research despite my disability. Stephen Hawking ABOUT THE AUTHOR STEPHEN HAWKING was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for thirty years, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including, most recently, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His books for the general reader include the classic A Brief History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universes, The Universe in a Nutshell, A Briefer History of Time and The Grand Design.

EDELSTEIN No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hawking, S. W. (Stephen W.) A brief history of time / Stephen Hawking. p. cm. Includes index. eISBN: 978-0-553-89692-3 1. Cosmology. I. Title. QB981.H377 1998 523.1—dc21 98-21874 Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in the U.S.


pages: 157 words: 47,161

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Olbers’ paradox, place-making, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, uranium enrichment

Michelle Kaku and Alyson Kaku CONTENTS Introduction to the Final Theory 1 Unification—The Ancient Dream 2 Einstein’s Quest for Unification 3 Rise of the Quantum 4 Theory of Almost Everything 5 The Dark Universe 6 Rise of String Theory: Promise and Problems 7 Finding Meaning in the Universe Acknowledgments Notes Selected Reading INTRODUCTION TO THE FINAL THEORY It was to be the final theory, a single framework that would unite all the forces of the cosmos and choreograph everything from the motion of the expanding universe to the most minute dance of subatomic particles. The challenge was to write an equation whose mathematical elegance would encompass the whole of physics. Some of the most eminent physicists in the world embarked upon this quest. Stephen Hawking even gave a talk with the auspicious title “Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?” If such a theory is successful, it would be science’s crowning achievement. It would be the holy grail of physics, a single formula from which, in principle, one could derive all other equations, starting from the Big Bang and moving to the end of the universe.

The latest excitement concerning black holes came about when the quantum theory was applied to gravity. These calculations unleashed a wellspring of unexpected phenomena that test the limits of our imagination. As it turns out, our guide through this uncharted territory was totally paralyzed. As a graduate student at Cambridge University, Stephen Hawking was an ordinary youth, without much direction or purpose. He went through the motions of being a physicist, but his heart was not there. It was obvious that he was brilliant, but he seemed unfocused. But one day, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and told he would die within two years.

Why not, he said, using mathematics, lift one of the pieces into an imaginary third dimension so they can fit together, one on top of the other? When this was done, the Flatlanders were amazed and astonished at the dazzling, shimmering jewel that suddenly emerged before them, with its perfect, glorious symmetry. Or, as Stephen Hawking wrote, If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Ibid. 25. Ford, Interview with James Manyika, in Architects of Intelligence, p. 279. 26. Ford, Interview with Fei-Fei Li, in Architects of Intelligence, p. 157. 27. Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek, “Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence—but are we taking AI seriously enough?,’” The Independent, May 1, 2014, www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough-9313474.html. 28. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. vii. 29.

This is a far more speculative fear that arises only if we someday succeed in building a genuinely intelligent machine. This remains the stuff of science fiction. Nonetheless, the quest to create true, human-level artificial intelligence is the Holy Grail of the field, and a number of very smart people take this concern very seriously. Prominent individuals like the late Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have issued warnings about the specter of out-of-control AI, with Musk in particular setting off a media frenzy by declaring that artificial intelligence research is “summoning the demon” and that “AI is more dangerous than nuclear weapons.”6 Given all this, one might wonder why we should choose to open Pandora’s box.

Butler called for an immediate war against this emerging mechanical species, proclaiming that “every machine of every sort should be destroyed,”1 a concern that seems a bit premature given the state of information technology in 1863, but which sketched out a narrative that has been repeated again and again, most recently in movies like The Terminator and The Matrix. Nor are Butler’s fears confined to science fiction. Recent advances in AI have led prominent figures like Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking to warn of scenarios remarkably similar to what Butler worried about more than 150 years ago. Opinions differ as to exactly when artificial intelligence became a serious field of study. I would mark the origin as 1950. In that year, the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing published a scientific paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” that asked the question “Can machines think?”


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

This provided a bridge between computing and the real world, combining virtual reality with a physical environment, using force fields to simulate real objects and giving the “player” a unique experience that could take them to the African veldt or a nineteenth-century saloon—or, as the character Data famously did, put them in a poker game with Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking—played by the actual scientist and Star Trek fan. Like much science fiction, Star Trek had, ever since the original series, taken shields and tractor beams for granted. We’ll come back to the difficulties with creating a holodeck a little later, but let’s make a start with the basics that would be needed to make it work.

(And possibly also reflecting the appeal to the typical readers of the pulp magazines of a cover image showing a scantily clad woman being attacked by an alien.) One way that this science fiction trope of the alien marauder putting human life at risk has strongly leaked out into the real world of science was in the warning of the danger we face from aliens that came from the physicist Stephen Hawking. In 2010, Hawking raised a few eyebrows by suggesting in a documentary for the Discovery Channel that any alien visitors could simply be interested in making use of our resources, commenting: “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”

Two other possible techniques aliens could use once they spotted that the Sun had planets would be to compare the day and nighttime brightness of the planet—less differentiated when there is large amount of artificial light used—and to use the spectroscopic analysis of light from the Sun that has passed through our atmosphere to deduce its chemical composition and likelihood that this was consistent with an advanced civilization. We certainly can’t truly hide, as Stephen Hawking seems to want us to, but equally we are a small planet in a not particularly distinguished part of the Milky Way—so any aliens on the lookout for other inhabited planets would probably need to be fairly lucky to spot us. Which begs the question of what is happening in the field of flying saucers and alien visits.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

We have the Internet. We have our smartphones. The founders of the dominant companies—the companies that hold “the whip that lashes us”—have net worths of $65 billion, $90 billion, $130 billion. High-profile individuals such as Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Martin Rees, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the late Stephen Hawking have issued dire warnings about AI, resulting in the ascendancy of well-funded institutes tasked with promoting “Nice AI.” But will we, as a species, be able to control a fully realized, unsupervised, self-improving AI? Wiener’s warnings and admonitions in The Human Use of Human Beings are now very real, and they need to be looked at anew by researchers at the forefront of the AI revolution.

The failure of the initial overly optimistic predictions of AI dampened talk about the technological singularity for a few decades, but since the 2005 publication of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity IS Near, the idea of technological advance leading to superintelligence is back in force. Some believers, Kurzweil included, regard this singularity as an opportunity: Humans can merge their brains with the superintelligence and thereby live forever. Others, such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, worried that this superintelligence would prove to be malign and regarded it as the greatest existing threat to human civilization. Still others, including some of the contributors to the present volume, think such talk is overblown. Wiener’s lifework and his failure to predict its consequences are intimately bound up in the idea of an impending technological singularity.

Chapter 3 THE PURPOSE PUT INTO THE MACHINE STUART RUSSELL Stuart Russell is a professor of computer science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is the co-author (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Computer scientist Stuart Russell, along with Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, and numerous others, has insisted that attention be paid to the potential dangers in creating an intelligence on the superhuman (or even the human) level—an AGI, or artificial general intelligence, whose programmed purposes may not necessarily align with our own. His early work was on understanding the notion of “bounded optimality” as a formal definition of intelligence that you can work on.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Fowler, “A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization”, Nature, 2 September 2012 (online). http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7415/full/nature11421.html 60 Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Frank Wilczek, “Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence – but are we taking AI seriously enough?”, The Independent, 2 May 2014. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-9313474.html 61 Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever & the OpenAI team, “Introducing OpenAI”, 11 December 2015 https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ 62 Steven Levy, “How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers From Taking Over”, 11 December 2015 https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator-plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over-17e0e27dd02a#.qjj55npcj 63 Sara Konrath, Edward O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing.

As human beings and as social animals, we will have to think individually and collectively about how we respond to issues such as life extension, designer babies, memory extraction and many more. At the same time, we must also realize that these incredible discoveries could also be manipulated to serve special interests – and not necessarily those of the public at large. As theoretical physicist and author Stephen Hawking and fellow scientists Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek wrote in the newspaper The Independent when considering the implications of artificial intelligence: “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all…All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks”.60 One interesting development in this area is OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company announced in December 2015 with the goal to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”.61 The initiative – chaired by Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors - has secured $1 billion in committed funding.


pages: 130 words: 42,093

Underestimated: An Autism Miracle by J. B. Handley, Jamison Handley

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, coronavirus, microbiome, neurotypical, Rosa Parks, Stephen Hawking

It’s being spelled out for us, little by little, by Jamie himself. It’s surreal. Life is a gift right now, a giant gift. DM also took Jamie though a lesson about Stephen Hawking. He provokes an important question. We all accept that Stephen Hawking was brilliant, despite his inability to get his body to do what he wanted, due to his ALS, right? Is believing the same thing is happening with nonspeakers really that big a leap? DM asks Jamie how Stephen Hawking might have felt when diagnosed with ALS at twenty-one. “Horrible,” he answers. “How do you think he felt fifty years later about his life?” she asks. Jamie spells, “Satisfied.”

Yes, I’m frustrated, I wish DM were here so she could ask him exactly why he’s crying. But I think I know. Elizabeth prepared me. Yes, it hurts to hear him wail, but it also affirms for me that this is it, it’s really happening. Jamie is Vince, and he always was, and here he comes. The Pearl District Quiet people have the loudest minds. —Stephen Hawking It’s been two weeks since our miraculous trip to see DM. It’s early and there’s a chilly bite in the air. I’m walking through Portland’s hip and trendy Pearl District, on my way to my office. Well, sort of on my way. Honestly, I’ve been walking now for nearly an hour, mostly in circles, trying to calm my mind.


pages: 192 words: 63,813

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

For the language in the 1988 NASA authorization act, H.R. 4218, 100th Congress, 2nd Session, see https://­space​.­nss​.­org​/­wp​-­content​ /­uploads​/­Space​-S ­ ettlement​-­Act​- ­Of​-­1988​.­pdf, Section 3(a)(2)(d). 3. Michael Sainato, “Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Think the Earth Is Doomed,” Observer, June 30, 2017, https://­observer​.­com​ /­2017​/­06​/c­ olonizing​-­mars​-­elon​-­musk​-­stephen​-­hawking​-­jeff​-­bezos​/­. 4. Corey S. Powell, “Jeff Bezos Foresees a Trillion ­People Living in ­ illions of Space Colonies. ­Here’s What He’s ­Doing to Get the Ball M Rolling,” NBC News, May 15, 2019, https://­www​.­nbcnews​.­com​/­mach​ /­s cience​/­jeff​-­bezos​-­foresees​-­trillion​-­people​-­living​-­millions​-­space​ -­colonies​-­here​-­ncna1006036; Shawn Langlois, “Elon Musk Says Jeff Bezos’s Plan to Colonize Space ‘Makes No Sense,’ ” MarketWatch, May 23, 2019, https://­www​.­marketwatch​.­com​/­story​/­elon​-­musk​-­jeff​ -­bezos​-­space​-­colony​-­plan​-­makes​-­no​-­sense​-2 ­ 019​-­05​-2 ­ 3; Sainato, “Stephen Hawking.” 5.

Although O’Neill’s vision dealt primarily with establishing a society in space colonies that would prove superior in its organ­ization and rules to any on Earth, many of his supporters have stressed their belief that ­these colonies could preserve humanity once our planet becomes uninhabitable. Numerous high-­profile individuals, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, have projected their fear that this crisis ­will arrive within a ­century or so. As a result, they urge us to begin our efforts to colonize another planet to establish the nucleus of a new civilization that w ­ ill survive Earth’s demise. In 2016, Musk told the International Astronautical Congress that we face a crucial choice between two outcomes: “One is that we stay on Earth forever and then t­ here ­will be an inevitable extinction event.

To the extent that members of the public and funding agencies recognize and accept this vision of the f­ uture, they w ­ ill realize, possibly consciously, that the desire to see astronauts on Mars proj­ects 14 8 · THE END OF ASTRONAUTS our desires to establish ­human socie­ties on another planet. This may well occur at some point in the ­f uture, ­whether or not ­these socie­ ties represent e­ ither an adjunct to terrestrial civilization or the necessary escape pod promoted by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. This diaspora w ­ ill not occur by 2040, however, u ­ nless the passions that once created a race to the moon bypass the rational approach of an international effort that re­spects the need to maintain a pristine Mars, so far as pos­si­ble, in order to preserve our ability to discover Martian life and to assure that it has not been contaminated by life brought from Earth.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

| SXSW 2018,” YouTube video, posted by South by Southwest, March 11, 2018, 1:11:37, https:// www .youtube .com /watch ?v =kzlUyrccbos. 171   “Whereas the short-term impact … with AI” : Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Frank Wilczek, “Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence—But Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?,’ ” Independent , October 23, 2017, https:// www .independent .co .uk /news /science /stephen -hawking -transcendence -looks -implications -artificial -intelligence -are -we -taking -ai -seriously -enough -9313474 .html. 173   “It’s not that I hate AI” : Similarly, Roko’s basilisk, a thought experiment initiated on a discussion board for rational thought about technology called LessWrong, theorized that a future AI would have an incentive to torture anyone who could imagine the agent but did not try to help it come into existence.

AR can also contain and display the names of indigenous tribes displaced by colonists, images of the sacred sites on which an office building now stands, pictures of who was lynched in a town square, or videos of the cyclists mowed down on a particular city street. Digital never forgets, and cybernetics makes sure that everything eventually comes back. Even if they can outrun all that, there’s one force that the tech titans almost universally fear more than any other: artificial intelligence. In January 2015, when Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Google’s director of research, Peter Norvig, joined the founders of AI companies including DeepMind and Vicarious in signing an open letter about the frightening potential for artificial intelligence to end the human race, I wasn’t sure how to react. Other than Hawking, these men were mostly industry developers and salesmen, and had histories of overstating the abilities of their technologies.

As he explained during his South by Southwest keynote in 2018, “I think the danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot and nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to build nuclear warheads if they want. That would be insane. And mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes. Far.” But the way people may choose to use AI is less frightening to technologists than what an AI may choose to do itself. As Stephen Hawking explained his justification for signing onto the 2015 open letter, “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” Hawking gives voice to The Mindset’s ultimate hubris: that it has created something that could go meta on them .


pages: 297 words: 84,447

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

“The Boy Who Played with Fusion,” Popular Science (2012), http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played-fusion; “Young Scientist Jamie Edwards in Atomic Fusion Record,” BBC News (2014), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-26450494/young-scientist-jamie-edwards-in-atomic-fusion-record. 5. “A Tool for Tracking Millions of Parts,” Iter Newsline (2014), https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/1887; Space Shuttle Era Facts, NASA (2011), https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/566250main_2011.07.05%20SHUTTLE%20ERA%20FACTS.pdf. 6. “Stephen Hawking: Why We Should Embrace Fusion Power,” BBC News (2016), https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161117-stephen-hawking-why-we-should-embrace-fusion-power. 7. “Boris Johnson Jokes About UK Being on the Verge of Nuclear Fusion,” New Scientist (2019), https://www.newscientist.com/article/2218570-boris-johnson-jokes-about-uk-being-on-the-verge-of-nuclear-fusion/#ixzz66tYUwh6k. 8.

Bairstow, “Tokamak Energy Wins $580k from US Government to Tackle Fusion Challenges,” Energy Live News (2020), https://www.energylivenews.com/2020/09/07/tokamak-energy-wins-580k-from-us-government-to-tackle-fusion-challenges/. 5. “Oxford Startup Promises Fusion Gain by 2024,” EENews Europe (2019), https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/oxford-startup-promises-fusion-gain-2024#. Chapter 2: Build a Star, Save the Planet 1. “Gods of Science: Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox Discuss Mind Over Matter,” Guardian (2010), https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/sep/11/science-stephen-hawking-brian-cox. 2. Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, “One-Sixth of Global Economy Under Net Zero Targets” (2019), https://eciu.net/news-and-events/press-releases/2019/one-sixth-of-global-economy-under-net-zero-targets. 3. R. N.

The engineers want to build machines that can withstand such extremes. But there’s another reason too, one that’s much more important for the rest of us. Building a star and perfecting power from nuclear fusion could provide humanity with millions, perhaps billions, of years of clean energy. When the BBC asked Professor Stephen Hawking what world-changing idea he would like to see humanity implement, he said, “the development of fusion power to give an unlimited supply of clean energy.” No wonder star power is sometimes described as the “Holy Grail of energy production.”6 Like the Holy Grail, fusion has been elusive. This has spawned a delightful range of jokes.


pages: 433 words: 124,454

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power by Keith Barnham

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Arthur Eddington, carbon footprint, credit crunch, decarbonisation, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, wikimedia commons

The sunlight to electrical power conversion efficiency of these concentrator cells is three times that of a typical 14 per cent efficient silicon panel on rooftops today. At the same conference, the average efficiency of the cells manufactured by the rival company that holds the world record (44 per cent) for one research cell was reported to be lower than 42.5 per cent [9]. 1. Stephen Hawking, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, Part I, ‘Aliens’, Channel 4, 18 September 2010. 2. Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, Why Does E = Mc2? (and why should we care?), Da Capo Press Inc. (2009). 3. Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Doubleday (2003). 4. Jeremy Leggett, Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis, Portobello Books (2005). 5.

Environmental disasters have occurred in the Gulf of Mexico and downwind of the nuclear reactors in Fukushima. There is environmental damage from coal burning, fracking, shale-oil extraction, deforestation and drilling for fossil fuels in sensitive environments. E = mc2: There is an alternative Stephen Hawking, the famous cosmologist, made an important conjecture about one of these three existential threats when he speculated about alien civilisations elsewhere in the cosmos. He posed the question: if more advanced civilisations do exist somewhere in the cosmos, why have none of them yet colonised our earth?

Maxwell’s equations In 1865 Maxwell discovered that sunlight consisted of waves of electric and magnetic fields and found a way to describe their behaviour exactly in mathematical equations, one of which was Faraday’s law. There are plenty of popular books about quantum theory, but few about Maxwell’s equations. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Peter Atkins’s Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science each devote only one paragraph to Maxwell’s theory. Yet Maxwell’s equations and quantum ideas together underpin all the technological breakthroughs of the semiconductor revolution. The silicon chip, laptop computers and mobile phones all depend for their operation on Maxwell’s equations and quantum theory.


pages: 234 words: 63,844

Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein by James Patterson, John Connolly, Tim Malloy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, corporate raider, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Murray Gell-Mann, Ponzi scheme, Stephen Hawking, WikiLeaks

Toward the end of Chief Reiter’s investigation, in March of 2006, Epstein had hosted twenty top physicists—including three Nobel Prize winners as well as the celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking—at a Saint Thomas symposium called “Confronting Gravity,” which was advertised as “a workshop to explore fundamental questions in physics and cosmology.” “This is a remarkable group,” one of the Nobel Prize winners told a reporter for the St. Thomas Source. “There is no agenda except fun and physics, and that’s fun with a capital F,” Epstein said. Epstein had been especially interested in Stephen Hawking. Someday, Hawking had theorized, the universe would stop expanding and collapse, at which point time would begin to run backwards.

It was an odd thing, Epstein’s association with this self-professed PhD who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a bit of a grifter. But the Mindshift conference that Epstein and Seckel hosted in the Virgin Islands did take place, in 2010. Murray Gell-Mann was there, along with Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist who coauthored books with Stephen Hawking. Gerald Sussman, an expert on artificial intelligence who taught at MIT and also attended the conference, said that he didn’t remember too much about it. “We had scientific discussions, talked about various things,” he said vaguely. When Mark Oppenheimer asked him if he’d given money to Seckel, Sussman “got testy” with the reporter.

Several recipients of Epstein’s charitable contributions, including New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital and Ballet Palm Beach, announced that they would not be accepting new gifts. “The further I can keep myself from anything like that the better,” said Ballet Palm Beach founder Colleen Smith. But in 2012, Epstein held one more conference on Little Saint Jeff’s. Once again, three Nobel Prize winners were in attendance. Stephen Hawking was also there. All in all, Epstein had gathered twenty-one physicists—from Princeton, Harvard, MIT, and CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research)—to “determine what the consensus is, if any, for defining gravity.” According to a press release issued by Epstein’s foundation, the consensus that did emerge was that space is “not quite empty.”


pages: 315 words: 89,861

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

Quantum Physics and the Idea of a “Subjective Reality” Today, given the pace of technological progress in video games and computers since Dick’s time, science fiction writers are not alone in believing that we are all living in a simulation. Many prominent scholars and renowned physicists are voicing their beliefs that we live in a sophisticated simulation. The celebrated physicist and author of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking, speculated that we have a 50 percent chance of being in a simulated reality. He’s not the only well-known physicist to think so. Host of the new Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has said that he thinks it’s very likely that the universe is a simulation. The assertions of such well-known scientists are notable and led me to explore what quantum physics might reveal about the simulation hypothesis.

According to Susumu Tonegawa, professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT, these false memories end up having the same neural structure as real memories.9 If our memories of the past can be modified, does this also mean that the past can effectively be modified? Is there a meaningful distinction between these two? Stephen Hawking raises the point that his research into black holes brought up a disturbing aspect of information loss of particles that go in to but do not come out of a black hole. “If determinism breaks down, we can’t be sure of our past history either,” Hawking said. “The history books and our memories could just be illusions.

Parallel Lives and Future Selves: The Great Game If parallel universes are being created each time we make a major decision (or a minor one, in the realm of quantum physics), then there is a directed graph of multiple universes that are branching out, as shown in Figure 23. This would imply that each branch gets branched again, and we end up with an ever-increasing number of universes each time a quantum decision is made. However, one theory, which was the subject of one of Stephen Hawking’s final papers, is that the actual number of parallel universes may not be infinite but limited to a smaller number. This idea of a limited number of parallel universes—based on a limited number of different configurations of particles (and/or at a higher level) and a limited number of choices—implies that even though every quantum decision spawns a universe, some of these universes are similar.


pages: 265 words: 76,875

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

The Truth B ­ ehind Title IV of the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015,” available at http://­deepspaceindustries​.­com​/­is​-­asteroid​-­mining​-­legal​/­. 17. Peter Holley, “Stephen Hawking Just Gave Humanity a Due Date for Finding Another Planet,” Washington Post, November 17, 2016. 18. Sara Fecht, “Stephen Hawking Says We Have 100 Years to Colonize a New Planet—­Or Die. Can We Do It?,” Popu­lar Science, May 4, 2017, available at http://­www​.­popsci​.­com​/­stephen​-­hawking​-­human​ -­extinction​-­colonize​-­mars. 19. Freeman Dyson interview, May 8, 2017. 242 FURTHER R EADING Batygin, Konstantin, Gregory Laughlin, and Alessandro Morbidelli.

His team now inclines t­oward descriptors for t­ hese varied potential travelers that include “Starlight,” “Moonlight,” and (you guessed it) “Redlight.” Many who have heard of Lubin’s plans associate them with the publicity boost that they received in April 2016, when the Russian-­ born technologist Yuri Milner announced his support for this laser-­launched initiative. With an impressive board of advisors that included Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, Martin Rees, former astronaut Pete Worden, and the Nobel-­prizewinning physicists Stephen Chu and Saul Perlmutter, Milner’s proj­ect drew immediate public attention for its projected happy outcome, its pledge of $100 million to support Lubin’s goals, and its claim that success could occur within the next generation of space explorers.

Any reasonable prediction of the uncertain f­uture of humanity places the colonization of exoplanets at least a few centuries in our ­future, when (so dreams are made) spacecraft carry­ing would-be colonists on hundred-­light-­year journeys ­toward other worlds ­will set out from what might be an Earth d ­ ying as the result of previous h ­ uman activities, including the extraction and consumption of once-­buried minerals. To t­hose who find ­these notions entirely fanciful, we cite the statement that Stephen Hawking made in 2016: “Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the h ­ uman race.”17 Looking t­oward the comparatively near ­future, Hawking stated that if humanity hopes to avoid extinction, we must plan to become a multiplanet species within the next ­century, presumably by colonizing Mars.18 To this apocalyptic vision, the physicist Freeman Dyson offers a single word of judgment: “rubbish!”


How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

ALSO BY JULIAN GUTHRIE The Billionaire and the Mechanic The Grace of Everyday Saints PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2016 by Julian Guthrie Preface copyright © 2016 by Richard Branson Afterword copyright © 2016 by Stephen Hawking Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.

Contents Also by Julian Guthrie Title Page Copyright Dedication Foreword by Richard Branson Prologue Mojave Desert PART ONE THE INFINITE CORRIDOR One Unruly Two Early Regrets Three Pete in Space Four Mojave Magic Five Space Medicine Six Being a Lindbergh Seven A Career in Orbit Eight Struggles in the Real World Nine Meeting the Magician Ten An Out-of-This-World Idea PART TWO THE ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE Eleven Eyes on the Prize Twelve Cowboy Pilot Thirteen History Repeats Itself Fourteen The Space Derby Fifteen Epiphanies in the Mojave Sixteen Peter’s Pitches Seventeen A Lindbergh Sculpts a Dream Eighteen Peter Blasts Off Nineteen Elon’s Inspiration Twenty Burt and Paul’s Big Adventure Twenty-one A Lifeline for the XPRIZE Twenty-two A Display of Hardware Twenty-three Another Lindbergh Takes Flight Twenty-four A Hole in One PART THREE A RACE TO REMEMBER Twenty-five A Fire to Be Ignited Twenty-six The Test of a Lifetime Twenty-seven Flirting with Calamity Twenty-eight Power Struggles Twenty-nine In Pursuit of a Masterpiece Thirty One for the Money Thirty-one Rocketing to Redemption Thirty-two Hallowed Company Epilogue: Where Are They Now? Afterword: Space, Here I Come! by Stephen Hawking Photographs Author’s Note Acknowledgments Index Foreword by Richard Branson Prizes have spurred great milestones and launched industries. The British government’s Longitude Prize, offered in 1714, ended up saving both sailors’ lives and ships. I was already a believer that prizes can make an incredible difference when Peter Diamandis came to see me about funding his $10 million XPRIZE.

HLI is Peter’s mechanism for achieving longevity—his Harvard Medical School redux—so he can one day be assured his trip to space. In addition, the ZERO-G Corporation has flown more than fifteen thousand people, ages nine to ninety-three, into weightlessness. In 2007, Peter and Byron Lichtenberg flew Professor Stephen Hawking, the world’s expert on gravity, into zero gravity. ZERO-G is now the sole provider of parabolic flight services to NASA. Peter lives in Santa Monica, is the best-selling coauthor of Abundance and Bold, and travels the globe talking to Fortune 500 CEOs and advising entrepreneurs. He and his wife, Kristen, have twin boys, Jet and Dax.


pages: 117 words: 30,538

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

8-hour work day, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Community Supported Agriculture, content marketing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Jeff Bezos, market design, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Stephen Hawking, web application

“Atul Gawande on the Ultimate End Game.” The Washington Post, October 16, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/10/16/atul-gawande-on-what-leadership-means-in-medicine/?utm_term=.8a7ee359539e. Accessed June 2018. Stephen Hawking Newport, Cal. “Stephen Hawking’s Productive Laziness.” Study Hacks Blog, January 11, 2017. http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/01/11/stephen-hawkings-productive-laziness/. Accessed June 2018. Yuki Kawauchi Barker, Sarah. “What the World’s Most Famous Amateur Can Teach Pro Runners.” Deadspin, January 9, 2018. https://deadspin.com/yuki-kawauchi-can-teach-you-how-to-run-1821725233.


pages: 203 words: 63,257

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, Skype, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

But if these rules were strictly true, we wouldn’t be here! At some point in the very early universe, there had to be some reactions that didn’t obey these conservation rules perfectly, in order to account for the dominance of matter over antimatter that we see today. The story of antimatter began with Paul Dirac, whom Stephen Hawking once described as “probably the greatest British theoretical physicist since Newton.” Dirac was born in 1902, in Bristol, in the southwest of England, where his father, a Swiss immigrant, was a French teacher and his mother was a librarian. Dirac didn’t get along well with his father, who was rather strict and demanded that his children speak to him only in French.

Unfortunately, the Higgs field theory provided little guidance to experimentalists: it did not specify the mass of the Higgs boson, so they did not know how energetic the collisions would have to be for it be detectable. Some prominent scientists were skeptical that it would ever be identified. Stephen Hawking, for one, wagered a hundred dollars against Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan, a proponent of Higgs, that the particle would not be found. Finding the Higgs boson, or ruling out its existence, was a top priority for the LHC, built over a decade at a cost of nearly $9 billion with the help of thousands of scientists and engineers.

“It’s certainly been a long wait,” he said at a press conference in Edinburgh a couple of days later. “At the beginning I had no idea whether a discovery would be made in my lifetime, because we knew so little at the beginning about where this particle might be in mass, and therefore how high energy machines would have to go before it could be discovered,” he added. Stephen Hawking paid up his bet with Gordon Kane. Like many other physicists, Hawking agreed that tracking down the Higgs boson was a major milestone in the history of physics. However, in an interview with the BBC, he also noted the flip side of what the discovery meant: “But it is a pity in a way because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn’t expect.”


There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

In the past, humans have always been able to expand as they have developed, but suddenly now, and for the foreseeable future at least, we can’t. That is a massive change. Even for those who are starting to view the one planet constraint as temporary (and I’ll debunk this later), the physicist Stephen Hawking put it like this: ‘We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least 100 years, so we have to be very careful in the meantime’2. There is no Planet B3. A handbook of everything 3 A handbook of everything This is a book about the big picture of life on our small planet. It is an evidence-based practical guide to the make or break choices we face now.

But since we would not have been able to get ourselves into the Anthropocene without it, this notion deserves much closer examination. Do we drive technology growth, or does it drive us? Right now we are slaves to a trajectory, but that doesn’t prove we have to be from now on. The late professor Stephen Hawking owed the last two thirds of his life to modern medicine. Without some of the advances of the past 100 years I too would be dead several times over, and several of my friends likewise. We are all grateful for the technology that keeps us going. But for all its advantages, Hawking also sensed danger ahead: ‘Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war.

We all have to adopt it. We may or may not love it but it wasn’t a choice. If a supermarket prefers to have humans at the check-out because of the social benefits they provide for both staff and customers, how long can they hold out against competitors who save money by replacing people with machines? Stephen Hawking described artificial intelligence as ‘either the best or worst thing to happen to humanity’4, whilst Elon Musk, one of the great entrepreneurs of the automated electric car, also looks on it as an it an existential threat. Whether or not the specific concern over AI is well founded, it is clear that technology as a whole has brought many good things over the millennia, but has now taken human-kind to a dangerous place and we need to handle it in a radically different way.


pages: 340 words: 91,416

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

So, quite contrary to the sense that this skeptical layperson would get, the idea that you can just make up crap is wrong. It’s an incredible struggle.” Tell me about struggle, I think, and nod. Making Problems The standard model, despite its success, doesn’t get much love from physicists. Michio Kaku calls it “ugly and contrived,” Stephen Hawking says it’s “ugly and ad hoc,” Matt Strassler disparages it as “ugly and baroque,” Brian Greene complains that the standard model is “too flexible,” and Paul Davies thinks it “has the air of unfinished business” because “the tentative way in which it bundles together the electroweak and strong forces” is an “ugly feature.”1 I yet have to find someone who actually likes the standard model.

The orbits tell us how much mass is squeezed into the observed region of space, and the lack of radiation tells us the object can’t have a hard surface. But black holes don’t fascinate only experimentalists, they also fascinate theorists. What intrigues them most are the consequences of a calculation by Stephen Hawking. In 1974, Hawking demonstrated that even though nothing can escape the horizon, a black hole can still lose mass by radiating off particles. The particles of what is now called “Hawking radiation” are created by quantum fluctuations of matter fields in the vicinity of the horizon. The particles are produced in pairs from energy in the gravitational field.

To my great relief it’s George who opens the door. “Hello,” he says, then asks me in and shows me to a sunlit kitchen. Children’s paintings decorate the walls. George Ellis, professor emeritus at the University of Cape Town, is one of the leading figures in the field of cosmology. In the mid-1970s, together with Stephen Hawking, he wrote The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, still a standard reference in the field.25 Already in 1975 he studied the question of what can be tested in cosmology, long before the multiverse brought the issue to everyone’s attention.26 But George’s interests aren’t restricted to cosmology.


pages: 256 words: 67,563

Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us About Life, Love and Relationships by Camilla Pang

autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, driverless car, frictionless, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Nash equilibrium, neurotypical, phenotype, random walk, self-driving car, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

Everything is a choice about how to expend energy, for what end and in whose favour. In turn, this is going to affect our ability to address all the other things on our seesaw. There is never, or rarely, any such thing as total equilibrium for everything at once, because the factors are simply too many. Much like one of my favourite lines in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which tells us that ‘nothing is ever at rest’. The prospect of this caused many a sleepless night for me, as I waited up for the whole world to sleep along with me in phase. But the more we realize that there is a seesaw, the more we can make conscious decisions that create a minimum level of balance and order.

How to achieve your goals Quantum physics, network theory and goal setting It was my first heartbreak. I was eight years old, and he was the thing I felt the closest connection to, other than my dad’s fried noodles. You may remember him, as he was quite the name in science. I’m talking about Stephen Hawking. It would be hard to overstate my childhood hero worship for the greatest physicist of my lifetime. From the way I ate to how I looked out of a window and sat in a chair, I tried to copy him. It even got to the point of me emulating him as my chosen hero in drama class. I told you, I was in deep.

Cooking fish dishes in the kitchen with my dad, playing outside in the garden, making as many sandcastles as the heart and mind desired, sitting on ‘Millie’s rock’ on Looe beach in my awesome, multicoloured swimming costume. My penchant, aged seven, for gingham, re-enacting scenes from films using my mother’s Blue Denmark crockery, and imagining my future with my heartthrob: none other, of course, than Stephen Hawking. The colour, taste and smell of every memory remains clear in my mind, twenty years later. It was a time of doing whatever I wanted, not even considering what other people might think. The good life. This mixed bag of hobbies might have been random, and seemed shapeless, but all form part of the past light cone that has led me to this point: an accumulation of experiences that reinforce my interests, identity and individuality.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Kai-Fu Lee, “The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence,” New York Times, June 24, 2017. 16. Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 1, 2000. 17. Sarah Marsh, “Essays Reveal Stephen Hawking Predicted Race of Superhumans,” Guardian, October 4, 2018 18. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade.” 19. James Vincent, “Elon Musk Says We Need to Regulate AI Before It Becomes a Danger to Humanity,” theverge.com, July 17, 2017. 20. Stephen Hawking, “Artificial Intelligence Could Be the Greatest Disaster in Human History,” Independent, October 20, 2016. 21. James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (New York: St.

His conclusion: “Something like extinction.”16 This was not enough to slow down the development of these new technologies—just the opposite: Joy was writing before CRISPR and back when human beings were still the best chess players on the planet—but it did establish a pattern. Some of the people who know the most about where we’re headed are the wariest and the most outspoken. In October 2018, for instance, Stephen Hawking’s posthumous set of “last predictions” was published—his greatest fear was a “new species” of genetically engineered “superhumans” who would wipe out the rest of humanity.17 Or consider tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who described the development of artificial intelligence as “summoning the demon.”

“So that the next generation could have the entrepreneurial explosion like I saw on the internet,” said Bezos, conjuring up a vision of brown-and-yellow UPS shuttles delivering printer cartridges to the rings of Saturn.2 (Sometime this year, Vodafone and Nokia plan to set up a mobile phone network on the moon.)3 Or to escape the wreckage of planet Earth. In November 2016, Stephen Hawking told an audience that “spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves,” and gave us a thousand-year timetable to be off the Earth. The following May, he cut the deadline down to a century. “Earth is under threat from so many areas that it is difficult for me to be positive,” he said.4 Or, most compelling of all, because once you get to space, you’re on your own.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

For this experience, Virgin Galactic is asking a cool quarter of a million dollars (Figure 19). They’re getting it. As of late 2013, more than 650 people had paid deposits totaling $80 million. The list of people on the reservation list included Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Katy Perry, Paris Hilton, and Stephen Hawking. Branson, a diehard Trekkie, named his new spacecraft the Enterprise. He asked William Shatner to go up but said Shatner declined because he was afraid of flying. Shatner’s version is that Branson asked him how much he’d pay to go on the inaugural flight and he replied, “How much would you pay me to go on it?”

When Diamandis presented his idea to the FAA, they said regulations wouldn’t permit passengers to be in a diving airplane with their seat belts unstrapped. It took eleven years for him to overcome the objections and offer the public a nauseating but exhilarating experience. His most noted passenger was the iconic physicist Stephen Hawking. Diamandis had met Hawking through the X Prize Foundation, and the physicist told him of his dream to go into space. Diamandis offered a zero-gravity experience instead, and Hawking accepted on the spot. But the aircraft partner said, “Are you crazy? We’re going to kill the guy!” The FAA said, “You’re only licensed to fly able-bodied people.”

Carl Sagan put it this way: “Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring—not from exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.” Science fiction writer Larry Niven was more succinct: “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program.” We may be able to fend off impacts from space, but physicist Stephen Hawking sounds the alarm about other threats: “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”14 A mass exodus from Earth is implausible.


pages: 190 words: 46,977

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding

Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine

“If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course, without even thinking about it. No hard feelings. It’s just like if we are building a road and an anthill happens to be in the way, we don’t hate ants. We are just building a road. And so, good-bye anthill.”167 Elon is not the only one who has expressed concerns of this kind. One of the world’s greatest minds, the late Stephen Hawking, laid it out in plain language. In an interview with the BBC in 2014, the theoretical physicist said, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”168 There is no question that AI will soon touch almost everything humans do. Artificial intelligence is already present in cell phones and e-mail functions like predictive text and navigation.

HuffPost, 22 Dec. 2015. www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/spacexs-successful-landing-means-you-and-might-go-to-space_us_567968aee4b06fa6887ea04a. CBS News. “Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Stressed but ‘Optimistic,’ Predicts Big Increase in Model 3 Production.” CBS This Morning, 13 April 2018. www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-tesla-model-3-problems-interview-today-2018-04-13/. Cellan-Jones, Rory. “Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind.” BBC News, 2 Dec. 2014. www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540. Chang, Kenneth. “First Private Craft Docks with Space Station.” New York Times, 25 May 2012. nyti.ms/2p06S4L. Cofield, Calla. “Elon Musk Shows Childlike Joy (and Dread) in Rocket-Landing Video.”

Elon Musk, “The Boring Company Information Session.” 162. Elon Musk, interview by Chris Anderson. 163. Elon Musk, “The Boring Company Information Session.” 164. Vance, p. 43. 165. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 166. Paine, Do You Trust This Computer? 167. Paine, Do You Trust This Computer? 168. Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking Warns.” 169. Elon Musk, interview by Joe Rogan. 170. OpenAI, openai.com. 171. Elon Musk, interview by Joe Rogan. 172. Paine, Do You Trust This Computer? 173. Elon Musk, interview by Joe Rogan. 174. Neuralink, www.neuralink.com. 175. Elon Musk, interview by Mohammad Abdullah Al Gergawi. 176.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Richard Nixon, August 1969: Richard Nixon, “324—Address to the Nation on Domestic Programs,” American President Project, August 8, 1969. Milton Friedman, 1980: “Brief History of Basic Income Ideas,” Basic Income Earth Network, 1986. Bernie Sanders, May 2014: Scott Santens, “On the Record: Bernie Sanders on Basic Income,” Medium, January 29, 2016. Stephen Hawking, July 2015: “Answers to Stephen Hawking’s AMA Are Here,” Wired, July 2015. Barack Obama, June 2016: Chris Weller, “President Obama Hints at Supporting Unconditional Free Money Because of a Looming Robot Takeover,” Business Insider, June 24, 2016. Barack Obama, October 2016: Scott Dadich, “Barack Obama, Neural Nets, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of the World,” Wired, November 2016.

Building People CONCLUSION: MASTERS OR SERVANTS Acknowledgments Notes Newsletters To everyone who helped build Venture for America over the years. You made me believe in people. We are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity… the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining. —STEPHEN HAWKING Human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache. —TERRY GOU, FOUNDER OF FOXCONN INTRODUCTION THE GREAT DISPLACEMENT I am writing from inside the tech bubble to let you know that we are coming for your jobs. I recently met a pair of old friends for drinks in Manhattan.

Milton Friedman, 1980: “We should replace the ragbag of specific welfare programs with a single comprehensive program of income supplements in cash—a negative income tax… which would do more efficiently and humanely what our present welfare system does so inefficiently and inhumanely.” Bernie Sanders, May 2014: “In my view, every American is entitled to at least a minimum standard of living… There are different ways to get to that goal, but that’s the goal that we should strive to reach.” Stephen Hawking, July 2015: “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”


pages: 404 words: 134,430

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Science may not be equipped to answer certain "ultimate"-type questions, such as what there was before the beginning of the universe or what time it was before time began or where the matter for the Big Bang came from. So far these have been philosophical or religious questions, not scientific ones, and therefore have not been a part of science. (Recently, Stephen Hawking and other cosmologists have made some attempts at scientific speculations on these questions.) Evolutionary theory attempts to understand the causality of change after time and matter were "created" (whatever that means). As for the origin of life, biochemists do have a very rational and scientific explanation for the evolution from inorganic to organic compounds, the creation of amino acids and the construction of protein chains, the first crude cells, the creation of photosynthesis, the invention of sexual reproduction, and so on.

We have the evidence and we must stand up and be heard. 15 Pigeonholes and Continuums An African-Greek-German-American Looks at Race Science books rarely make the best-seller lists, but when they do they usually have something to do either with our cosmological origins and destiny—Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time—or with the metaphysical side of our existence—Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics. How, then, did Free Press sell over 500,000 copies of a $30 book (yes, that's $15 million) filled with graphs, charts, curves, and three hundred pages of appendices, notes, and references, all on the obscure topic of psychometrics?

And though he thinks that part of the problem is that his colleagues "are trained to detest religion so ferociously that even the suggestion that there might be some truth to the statements of religion is an outrage," Tipler says "the only reason the bigger names in the field of global general relativity, like Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, have not come to the same conclusion is that they draw back when they realize the outlandish consequences of the equations." Although Penrose and Hawking may retreat in deep understanding, in a revealing comment Tipler explained that most simply will not get it because "the essence of the Omega Point Theory is global general relativity.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

But as more and more people become unemployed, the consequent fall in demand will overtake the price reductions enabled by greater efficiency. Economic contraction is pretty much inevitable, and it will get so serious that something will have to be done.3 Similar views have been expressed by leading tech entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and distinguished scientists such as the late Sir Stephen Hawking, the discoverer of black holes and much else besides.4 Yet some cynics, admittedly mostly from outside the ranks of the AI experts, seem to think that this is all overhyped and that in essence the economic and social changes that we face as a result of the spread of robots and AI will either be nugatory, or a continuation of the sort of thing that we have experienced pretty much continuously since the Industrial Revolution and, as such, will be profoundly beneficial to humanity.

Once we have created artificial intelligences greater than any human one, they will then create still greater intelligences, completely beyond our ken and outside our control. And so on, and so forth. To these new forms of intelligence, we will be not only inferior but also worthless, if not actually an encumbrance. They could readily decide to destroy us. The late Sir Stephen Hawking told the BBC in 2014: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”5 Similarly, the distinguished Cambridge scientist Martin, Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal, has described the point at which AI achieves superintelligence as “our final hour.” He sees the period when human intelligence dominated the world as a blip.6 The time at which some form of AI becomes more intelligent than humans is widely referred to in the literature as “the Singularity.”

To someone of my ilk, even without the “uploading” and the prospect of eternal life, to read about the capability of AI and the fate of humanity after the Singularity is to plunge into a world that seems like science fiction. Nevertheless, as I shall show in the Epilogue, I do not dismiss such ideas. How could I? When some of the greatest scientific minds of our age, such as Sir Stephen Hawking and Lord Rees, have taken these prospects seriously, I am hardly in a position to disparage them. But I am profoundly conscious of a dislocation between the apparently science fiction world of the Singularity and the day-to-day advances of robotics and AI that have here-and-now effects on the economy.


pages: 171 words: 51,276

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

Or two presents, and focus on information gathered, say, ten seconds and thirty seconds ago? Physics provides no explanation for our experience of “now.” For this reason, some have looked for other explanations. One such physicist is Jim Hartle of University of California at Santa Barbara, a collaborator of British physicist Stephen Hawking. He thinks that, early in the evolution of life, there may have been organisms that experienced time in myriad different ways, not just the way we do today. But say a tree frog had a delayed present and focused on information from ten seconds ago—if a fly alighted on a leaf in front of it, by the time the tree frog lashed out its tongue, the fly would have long gone.

Admittedly, it might not be anything most people would want to do, but it takes only one person. And that possibility is enough to alarm physicists. Because they have to confront the question: how did the person go back in time and bump off their grandfather if they had never been born? To avoid the Grandfather Paradox, as it is known, Stephen Hawking proposed the Chronology Protection Conjecture. It is really just a fancy way of saying: time travel is impossible. In other words, some as-yet-unknown law of physics must intervene and prevent time travel and its associated paradoxes. Hawking’s argument is a simple observational one: “Where are the time travelers from the future?”

When Dicke put down the phone after talking to Penzias, he turned to his colleagues and said: “Well, boys, we’ve been scooped!” The radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson is now known to correspond to a temperature of 2.726 degrees above absolute zero. “The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful,” said Stephen Hawking. “It would heat your pizza only to minus 271.3 oC—not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it!” For the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, which confirmed the universe had been born in a Big Bang, Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics. And the pigeons?


pages: 292 words: 88,319

The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Charles Babbage, cosmological principle, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Isaac Newton, mutually assured destruction, Olbers’ paradox, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, short selling, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

There is good reason to think like this. Einstein’s theory may just be a low-energy approximation to string theory when the string tension gets high, and string theory has already shown that it can get rid of all sorts of other infinities. Maybe it can rid us of those at the start of the Universe as well? This is the hope of Stephen Hawking, who sees the infinities of Einstein’s theory of gravity as a signal that a quantum theory of gravity is needed to supersede it. Many people see the infinite beginning of the Universe, where space and time seem to spring into being ready-made, along with the impetus for the Universe to expand, as a mathematical expression of Divine creation.

In 1952, the Vatican embraced the picture of the expanding Big Bang universe as a natural conception of the Christian idea of creation out of nothing.11 It is interesting that the initial cosmological infinity is treated as acceptable by many scientists because they have been made used to the idea of the Universe having a beginning through religious traditions in the West. Yet it is dangerous to put too much faith in events at a moment where the density of the Universe is infinite. As Stephen Hawking advises, regarding the deduction of an infinity at the beginning of the Universe: ‘Although many people welcomed this conclusion, it has always profoundly disturbed me. If the laws of physics could break down at the beginning of the universe, why couldn’t they break down anywhere? . . . predictability would completely disappear.’12 Long ago, Einstein himself took a rather similar negative attitude to the appearance of infinities (‘singularities’) in the solutions to his equations.

One example would be the sudden coming together of fragments of glass to produce a wine glass – the time reverse of the process of breaking a glass into pieces. The other caveats all hinge upon the role that might be played by quantum theory. Up until 1974, black holes were believed to be inescapable matter traps. Once you passed in through the horizon there was no escape. Then Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes should not be completely black. Their strong gravitational fields will gradually produce pairs of particles close to the horizon at the expense of the mass and energy of the black hole. Gradually the mass of the hole will evaporate away. The process is very slow for large black holes that exist in the Universe today, and has no effect that we can see.


pages: 405 words: 117,219

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

There are scores of non-religious scientists who think similarly, although few would admit to it. Often they will use a vocabulary different from a metaphysical or religious one, in order to express very similar beliefs. For instance, prominent and self-declared agnostics, including the physicist Stephen Hawking, proclaim that human consciousness resembles a software program, and that at some time in the future it will be possible to extract it from your biological body, download it on a computer, so ‘you’ may live digitally forevermore. But isn’t this just saying in other words what religious people have been preaching all along?

If mind is immaterial (for instance, made of immaterial monads, or psychons), it could not affect something material like an electron. To do so the mind would have to be material. This argument from the law of conservation of energy ought to suffice in order to silence all those who hold dualist beliefs about the mind. Yet apparently it does not. At the premier of a documentary about his life Stephen Hawking, one of the most prominent living physicists of our time, declared that the brain could exist outside the body.8 He said, ‘I think the brain is like a programme in the mind, which is like a computer, so it’s theoretically possible to copy the brain on to a computer and so provide a form of life after death.’

Dennett’s reductionist theories seem to support the computer metaphor of the brain. The grey matter in our skulls can be reduced to an information-processing machine. But what exactly is the information that our brain processes? What is information made of? We saw in the previous chapter how eminent scientists such as Stephen Hawking believe that, one day, consciousness could be uploaded in a computer. Could it be that the brain is a material machine processing immaterial information bits? Could the self be something different from the brain – for instance, a complex pattern of bits? Does materialistic empiricism lead us back to the arms, or fangs, of non-materialistic dualism?


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

Peter Holley, ‘Bill Gates on dangers of artificial intelligence: “I don’t understand why some people are not concerned”‘, Washington Post, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/28/bill-gates-on-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-dont-understand-why-some-people-are-not-concerned/; Peter Holley, ‘Stephen Hawking just got an artificial intelligence upgrade, but still thinks AI could bring an end to mankind’, Washington Post, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/12/02/stephen-hawking-just-got-an-artificial-intelligence-upgrade-but-still-thinks-it-could-bring-an-end-to-mankind/; Derek Thompson, ‘A world without work’, Atlantic, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/; Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (Atlantic, 2015); Brian Resnick, ‘Why Stephen Hawking is more afraid of capitalism than robots’, Vox.com, 2016, http://www.vox.com/2016/2/27/11119804/stephen-hawking-robots; Matthew Yglesias, ‘The automation myth’, Vox.com, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9038829/automation-myth. 30.

The overwhelming majority of transhumanists think that AI is a positive development: it will help humans become more intelligent, help us make better decisions and will open up amazing new avenues of knowledge and understanding. Perhaps it will. But perhaps it won’t. Elon Musk, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, declared AI to be comparable to summoning the Devil and donated $10 million to research to make sure the super-machines of the future will be kind to us. Stephen Hawking said ‘the development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’ Either way, and of more immediate concern, AI—or the ability of machines to replicate human decision-making—could leave millions without jobs.29 Google’s self-driving cars will replace drivers, drones will replace warehouse workers, machine-learning algorithms will undertake some (although not all) the work of lawyers and doctors.

Peter Holley, ‘Bill Gates on dangers of artificial intelligence: “I don’t understand why some people are not concerned”‘, Washington Post, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/28/bill-gates-on-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-dont-understand-why-some-people-are-not-concerned/; Peter Holley, ‘Stephen Hawking just got an artificial intelligence upgrade, but still thinks AI could bring an end to mankind’, Washington Post, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/12/02/stephen-hawking-just-got-an-artificial-intelligence-upgrade-but-still-thinks-it-could-bring-an-end-to-mankind/; Derek Thompson, ‘A world without work’, Atlantic, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/; Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (Atlantic, 2015); Brian Resnick, ‘Why Stephen Hawking is more afraid of capitalism than robots’, Vox.com, 2016, http://www.vox.com/2016/2/27/11119804/stephen-hawking-robots; Matthew Yglesias, ‘The automation myth’, Vox.com, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9038829/automation-myth. 30. Cha, ‘Tech titans’ latest project’. 31. George Annas, Lori Andrews and Rosario Isasi, ‘Protecting the endangered human: toward an international treaty prohibiting cloning and inheritable alterations’, American Journal of Law and Medicine, 28:151, 2002. 32. Oddly, after I got back from the trip Jeremiah emailed me with a story about Roen he’d found online. Back in 2003 Roen and his older brother had run away from home and were found by the police camping in the forest near Vancouver.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Unless we appreciate that, we will fail to recognize what we lose when we engage an A.I. in their place. The major problem with A.I., however, is its risks. This is the discussion I have avoided, the crazy stuff: what happens when it evolves to the point where it is smarter than we are? This is a real concern of luminaries such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates, who have warned about the creation of a “super intelligence.” Musk said he fears that “we are summoning the demon.”7 Hawking says that it “could spell the end of the human race.”8 And Gates wrote: “I don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”9 The good news is that the engineers and policy makers are working on regulating A.I. to minimize the risks.

The debate concerns whether we should allow robots powered by A.I. to kill people autonomously. More than 20,000 people signed an open letter in July 2015 that called for a worldwide ban on autonomous killing machines. A thousand of these signatories were A.I. researchers and technologists, including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak.6 Their logic was simple: that once development begins of military robots enabled to autonomously kill humans, the technology will follow all technology cost and capability curves; that, in the not-so-distant future, A.I. killing machines will therefore become commodity items, easy to purchase and available to every dictator, paramilitary group, and terrorist cell.

Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,’ ” Washington Post 24 October 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon (accessed 21 October 2016). 8. Rory Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind,” BBC 2 December 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540 (accessed 21 October 2016). 9. “Hi Reddit, I’m Bill Gates and I’m back for my third AMA. Ask me anything,” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2tzjp7/hi_reddit_im_bill_gates_and_im_back_for_my_third (accessed 21 October 2016). 10.


pages: 185 words: 55,639

The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking

.… In these mind-bending realms, Gribbin's seasoned skills wonderfully simplify matters (and forces) without ‘dumbifying’ them.” —Gilbert Taylor, Booklist BY THE SAME AUTHOR In Search of the Edge of Time Hothouse Earth Being Human In Search of the Big Bang In Search of Schrödinger's Cat The Hole in the Sky Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (WITH MICHAEL WHITE) Albert Einstein: A Life in Science The Matter Myth (WITH PAUL DAVIES) In the Beginning Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality Companion to the Cosmos The Case of the Missing Neutrinos Almost Everyone's Guide to Science Thanks to Benjamin Gribbin for editorial assistance Copyright Copyright © 1998 by John and Mary Gribbin Illustrations copyright © 1998 by John Gribbin All rights reserved.

It is all heady stuff, at the cutting edge of current research, and new ideas eddy around in profusion in the scientific journals of the 1990s. The most exciting variation on the theme, as I shall shortly explain, treats ‘particles’ not as points but as one-dimensional strings which ‘move’ in a ten-dimensional spacetime. These are ‘superstring’ theories. On the other hand, some theorists, including, surprisingly, Stephen Hawking (who was one of the first big fans of N = 8 theory, and said that it might mark the end of physics by explaining everything that physicists ever set out to explain), see all of the Kaluza–Klein ideas as leading up a blind alley. The theorists who like the Kaluza–Klein version of super-gravity and SUSY today like it, not because of any experimental proof that it is correct, but because it is so beautiful and internally consistent.

He is good at this sort of thing, and he has turned out a clear and concise tale.” —Scientific American John Gribbin holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Cambridge University. His books, which have won awards in both Britain and the United States, include the bestselling In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (with Michael White), and Schrödigner's Kittens and the Search for Reality. He lives in Sussex with his wife, Mary, who is also a science writer, and their two sons. 1 10−13 means a decimal point followed by 12 zeros and a 1; 1013 means I followed by 13 zeros, and so on. 1 The electron itself was only discovered, remember, in 1897, so Planck's explanation of black body radiation was necessarily a little vague on the exact nature of the charged particles within the atoms, and how they might be ‘vibrating’ to produce electromagnetic waves. 2 This is especially ironic since in recent years several theorists have pointed out that there is a way, after all, in which you can account for the photoelectric effect in terms of electromagnetic waves interacting with quantized atoms.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Are these the rantings of crazed neo-Nazis? No. Substitute “Jews” and “Judaism” with “Scientologists” and “Church of Scientology” and you are reading from a statement issued by a group of anti-Scientologists calling themselves “Anonymous.” This statement was released January 21, 2008 (read in a YouTube video in a Stephen Hawking-like computer voice). It was followed by another on February 10, which coincided with demonstrations at Scientology centers around the world at which protesters donned masks (the Guy Fawkes variety from the movie V for Vendetta) and waved posters that read, among other things, “Honk if you hate Scientology.”

There would be absolutely nothing, including no conscious being to observe the nothingness. Just … nothing. Whatever that is. This presents us with what is arguably the deepest of deep problems, the grandest of grand questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? In his 1988 blockbuster book A Brief History of Time, the late Cambridge theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking articulated the issue in his characteristically memorable manner: What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.

In this model, universes are created out of nothing, but in the scientific version of ex nihilo the nothing of the vacuum of space actually contains quantum foam, which may fluctuate to create baby universes. In this configuration, any quantum object in any quantum state may generate a new universe, each one of which represents every possible state of every possible object.30 This is Stephen Hawking’s explanation for the fine-tuning problem that he himself famously presented in the 1990s: Why is the universe so close to the dividing line between collapsing again and expanding indefinitely? In order to be as close as we are now, the rate of expansion early on had to be chosen fantastically accurately.


pages: 400 words: 94,847

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

At the same time, a much smaller number of physicists continued to pursue other approaches to quantum gravity. In recent years a debate called by some the “string wars” has been waged between advocates of the different approaches. Many physicists claim string theory is the only reasonable approach to quantum gravity. Others, including Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Lee Smolin, believe different approaches are worth pursuing. Remarkably, some prominent string theorists dismiss the non-string theorists not just as wrong, but as misguided, or even as fools. When such a fundamental division occurs, it is nearly impossible for large groups to collaborate across that division.

A paper that’s cited tens of times is quite successful, while a paper that’s cited hundreds of times is either famous or well on its way. The original SDSS paper has been cited in other papers more than 3,000 times. That’s more citations than many highly successful scientists receive over their entire career. To give you some feeling for what an achievement this is, Stephen Hawking, probably the world’s most famous scientist, has just a single paper with more than 3,000 citations. Hawking’s paper, which he published in 1975, in fact has just over 4,000 citations as of 2011. By contrast, the SDSS paper was published in 2000, and already has more than 3,000 citations. It will soon catch up to and surpass Hawking’s paper.

A “preprint” is a scientific paper, often at late draft stage, ready to be considered by a scientific journal for publication, but not yet published in a journal. You can go to the arXiv right now, and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of up-to-the-minute preprints from the world’s physicists, all available for free download. Want to know what Stephen Hawking is thinking about these days? Go to the arXiv, search on “Hawking,” and you can read his latest paper—not something he wrote a few years or decades back, but the paper he finished yesterday or last week or last month. Want to know the latest on the hunt for fundamental particles of nature at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?


The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

“Colombian musicians organise online,” BBC News, June 1, 2006. http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5033626.stm. “FARC blamed for Colombia club blast,” BBC News, February 9, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2741105.stm. Page 207 Seth Godin, Unleashing the Ideavirus (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Do You Zoom, 2001), pp. 23–24. Stephen Hawking quote from “Life in the Universe,” 1994 (lecture given by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, the transcript of which can be viewed here: http://www.hawking.org.uk/ pdf/life.pdf). Page 211 Dizzee Rascal, interview by author, July 2002 (this interview originally appeared in the August 2002 edition of RWD magazine).

It only took 3 years for Netscape to get to 10 million, and it took Hotmail and Napster less than a year. . . . The time it takes for an idea to circulate is approaching zero.” Whether it’s an idea, MP3 file, or 3-D printer design, anything can pass through the network, infect us, and take on a life of its own. “I think computer viruses should count as life,” argues Stephen Hawking, citing their ability to reproduce and travel. “I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.” But not all viruses are destructive. Some man-made viruses, such as youth cultures, are fine examples of friendly bacteria.

*In 2002 I interviewed a crew of MCs who did a £250,000 music publishing deal, which seemed to be based on the fact that they used to go to the same school as some members of So Solid. They sold fewer than five hundred copies of their first single and were never heard from again. Ethernomics | 217 We’ve covered many viruses already, such as the Marc Ecko/ Droga5 video. Stephen Hawking was right about viruses; effective ones have lives of their own. A good idea virus can catapult a brand into the stratosphere, but not all viruses are created equal. It’s up to us to make them work. I realized we had to create something that would be valuable to others and worth their while to forward on.


pages: 262 words: 65,959

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, cognitive dissonance, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Wolfskehl Prize, women in the workforce

Subsequent decrees, such as a broccoli juice program and a plan to build a shadow-puppet theater (both Balinese and Thai), eventually cause the decent citizens of Springfield to rebel against the intellectual elite. Indeed, as the episode reaches its finale, the revolting masses focus their anger on Lisa, who is only saved when none other than Professor Stephen Hawking arrives in the nick of time to rescue her. Although we associate Hawking with cosmology, he spent thirty years as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, which makes him the most famous mathematician to have appeared on The Simpsons. However, not everyone recognizes Hawking when he arrives in his wheelchair.

Indeed, the leaves of Bauer’s tomato plant did contain nicotine, proving that science fact can be almost as strange as science fiction. The writers also encouraged Homer’s intellectual side to flourish in “They Saved Lisa’s Brain,” an episode that has already been discussed in Chapter 7. After Stephen Hawking saves Lisa from a baying mob, the story ends with Professor Hawking chatting to Lisa’s father in Moe’s Tavern, where he is impressed with Homer’s ideas about cosmology: “Your theory of a doughnut-shaped universe is intriguing . . . I may have to steal it.” This sounds ridiculous, but mathematically minded cosmologists claim that the universe might actually be structured like a doughnut.

In the case of Cygnus X-1, this is literally true, because it is the name of a black hole in the constellation Cygnus, and whatever happens in a black hole is forever condemned to remain in the black hole. The writers probably picked Cygnus X-1 because it is considered a glamorous black hole, thanks to being the subject of a famous wager. The mathematician and cosmologist Stephen Hawking had initially doubted that the object in question was indeed a black hole, so he placed a bet with his colleague Kip Thorne. When careful observations proved that he was wrong, Hawking had to buy Thorne a one-year subscription to Penthouse magazine. The episode’s title is a pun based on the Victorian novel The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope, in which King Rudolf of Ruritania (a fictional country) is drugged and kidnapped by his evil brother prior to his coronation.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

On investment and the business cycle, see Paul Krugman, “Shocking Barro,” New York Times (The Conscience of a Liberal blog), September 12, 2011, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/shocking-barro/. CHAPTER 9 1. Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, and Frank Wilczek, “Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence—But Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?,’” The Independent, May 1, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough-9313474.html. 2. James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2013), pp. 196–197. 3.

* For example, waiting tables in a full-service restaurant would require a very advanced robot—something that we’re unlikely to see anytime soon. However, when consumers are struggling, restaurant meals are one of the first things to go, so waiters would still be at risk. Chapter 9 SUPER-INTELLIGENCE AND THE SINGULARITY In May 2014, Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking penned an article that set out to sound the alarm about the dangers of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. Hawking, writing in the UK’s The Independent along with co-authors who included Max Tegmark and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, both physicists at MIT, as well as computer scientist Stuart Russell of the University of California, Berkeley, warned that the creation of a true thinking machine “would be the biggest event in human history.”


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

And, at the 2016 World Economic Forum at Davos, the focus was on the predicted elimination of most human jobs by machines, which we’re told will soon be able to do those jobs just as well as, if not better than, people. Some of the greatest minds of our time, including Stephen Hawking, Henry Kissinger,2 Elon Musk3 and Bill Gates,4 have expressed concerns about the future dominance of intelligent machines over people. Stephen Hawking went as far as to say: ‘I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’5 The path to a world dominated by machines and machine intelligence now seems inevitable, and we are told to feel confident in these predictions, in part because they themselves are the results of algorithms that have analysed real-world ‘big data’, thus avoiding human subjectivity.

DR ANASTASIA DEDYUKHINA, Founder of Consciously Digital and author of Homo Distractus ‘When the crowd at Comic Con talk of Robot Overlords, it can be disregarded as a fantasy far detached from real life. When you hear that a crowd of world-class technologists and scientists, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have publicly voiced their concerns that advanced AI technologies could pose an existential threat to humanity – trouble on the scale of climate change, bioplague and large asteroids – you really have to wonder what’s going on. Rage Inside the Machine is a guide to how we got here, conceptually and historically.

Future of Life Institute, https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/?cn-reloaded=1 4Stuart Dredge, 2015, Artificial intelligence will become strong enough to be a concern, says Bill Gates. Guardian, www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/29/artificial-intelligence-strong-concern-bill-gates 5Rory Cellan-Jones, 2014, Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind. BBC News, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30290540 6Bernard Marr, 2019, Chinese Social Credit Score: Utopian Big Data Bliss or Black Mirror on Steroids? Forbes, www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/01/21/chinese-social-credit-score-utopian-big-data-bliss-or-black-mirror-on-steroids/ 7Jana Kasperkevic, 2015, Google Says Sorry for Racist Auto-Tag in Photo App.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

President Barack Obama, in his 2016 farewell address, described automation as “the next wave of economic dislocation.” But so did President John F. Kennedy, about sixty years earlier, when, using almost identical words, he said that automation carried with it “the dark menace of industrial dislocation.”17 Similarly, in 2016 Stephen Hawking described how automation has “decimated” blue-collar work and predicted that this would soon “extend … deep into the middle classes.”18 Yet Albert Einstein had made a similar threat in 1931, warning that “man-made machines,” which were meant to liberate human beings from drudgery and toil, were instead poised to “overwhelm” their creators.19 In fact, in almost every decade since 1920, it is possible to find a piece in the New York Times engaging in some way with the threat of technological unemployment.20 UPHEAVAL AND CHANGE Most of these anxieties about the economic harm caused by new technology have turned out to be misplaced.

These machines would be the “last invention that man need ever make,” wrote Irving John Good, the Oxford mathematician who introduced the possibility of such an intelligence explosion: anything a human being could invent, they could improve upon.23 The prospect of such vastly capable AGIs has worried people like Stephen Hawking (“could spell the end of the human race”), Elon Musk (“vastly more risky than North Korea”), and Bill Gates (“don’t understand why some people are not concerned”)—though their worries are not always the same.24 One fear is that human beings, limited in what they can do by the comparatively snaillike pace of evolution, would struggle to keep up with the machines.

For President Obama’s farewell speech, see Claire Cain Miller, “A Darker Theme in Obama’s Farewell: Automation Can Divide Us,” New York Times, 12 January 2017. President Kennedy gave his speech at the AFL-CIO Convention, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 7 June 1960; see https://www.jfklibrary.org/. 18.  Stephen Hawking, “This Is the Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet,” Guardian, 1 December 2016. 19.  See “World Ills Laid to Machine by Einstein in Berlin Speech,” New York Times, 22 October 1931. In David Reichinstein, Albert Einstein: A Picture of His Life and His Conception of the World (Prague: Stella Publishing House, 1934), p. 96, the account of that speech reveals that Einstein was worrying, in part, about technological unemployment. 20.  


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

These weapons could inflict enormous damage on human populations. So, that’s autonomous weapons. MARTIN FORD: In 2014, you published a letter, along with the late Stephen Hawking and the physicists Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek, warning that we aren’t taking the risks associated with advanced AI seriously enough. It’s notable that you were the only computer scientist among the authors. Could you tell the story behind that letter and what led you to write it? (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-9313474.html) STUART J. RUSSELL: So, it’s an interesting story.

A number of very prominent public figures—none of whom are actual AI experts—have weighed in. Elon Musk has used especially extreme rhetoric, declaring that AI research is “summoning the demon” and that “AI is more dangerous than nuclear weapons.” Even less volatile individuals, including Henry Kissinger and the late Stephen Hawking, have issued dire warnings. The purpose of this book is to illuminate the field of artificial intelligence—as well as the opportunities and risks associated with it—by having a series of deep, wide-ranging conversations with some of the world’s most prominent AI research scientists and entrepreneurs.

It could be the case in political advertising, for example, or advertising that could change your behavior and have an impact on your health. I think we should be really, really careful about how these tools are used to influence people in general. MARTIN FORD: What about the warnings from people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking about an existential threat from super intelligent AI and getting into a recursive improvement loop? Are these things that we should be concerned about at this point? YOSHUA BENGIO: I’m not concerned about these things, I think it’s fine that some people study the question. My understanding of the current science as it is now, and as I can foresee it, is that those kinds of scenarios are not realistic.


What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge by Marcus Du Sautoy

Albert Michelson, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, banking crisis, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Black Swan, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Georg Cantor, Hans Lippershey, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, Turing test, wikimedia commons

In 1964 the first potential example of just such a high-density region was identified in the constellation of Cygnus. Called Cygnus X-1, by 1971 calculations of its mass and concentration led to the conjecture that it was a black hole. Not everyone was convinced. In fact, there was one notable person who made a bet in 1975 to the effect that Cygnus X-1 was not a black hole: Stephen Hawking. This was somewhat odd, given that he’d dedicated much of his research to probing the nature of black holes. If Cygnus X-1 turned out to be the first example of a black hole, all Hawking’s theoretical musings would have been justified. As he explained in A Brief History of Time, the bet was an insurance policy.

Eddington could see what the maths was implying but baulked at the implications: ‘When we prove a result without understanding it – when it drops unforeseen out of a maze of mathematical formulae – we have no grounds for hoping that it will apply.’ But in 1964 Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose proved that such singular points were a necessary consequence of the theory of general relativity. A black hole in two-dimensional space-time. The event horizon is a circle inside of which we cannot know. In collaboration with a young Stephen Hawking, Penrose went on to prove that the same infinite density is predicted when we rewind the universe back to the Big Bang. Both black holes and the Big Bang are examples in general relativity of a mathematical entity called a singularity. Singularities encompass a whole range of situations where it is impossible to work out what’s happening.

There is no way to rewind events to see what it was that passed that event horizon. Although it is referred to as a theorem, it should actually be called a conjecture, because there is no conclusive proof that information is truly lost. Indeed, in 1974 the extent to which the event horizon masks what’s going on inside a black hole was queried. This is because, according to Stephen Hawking, black holes are leaking. NOT-SO-BLACK BLACK HOLES Once my dice is thrown into a black hole, there seems to be no mechanism to know how it lands. At least many thought this must be the consequence of such a concentration of mass-warping space-time. But when Hawking applied the second law of thermodynamics to black holes, it turned out that they weren’t as black as everyone had originally thought.


pages: 257 words: 80,100

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, Doomsday Book, Eddington experiment, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, The future is already here, time dilation, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

(The universe itself—entire—would be rotating, something for which astronomers have found no evidence, and by Gödel’s calculations a CTC would have to be extremely large—billions of light-years—but people seldom mention these details.)*3 If the attention paid to CTCs is disproportionate to their importance or plausibility, Stephen Hawking knows why: “Scientists working in this field have to disguise their real interest by using technical terms like ‘closed timelike curves’ that are code for time travel.” And time travel is sexy. Even for a pathologically shy, borderline paranoid Austrian logician. Almost hidden inside the bouquet of computation, Gödel provided a few words of almost-plain English: In particular, if P, Q are any two points on a world line of matter, and P precedes Q on this line, there exists a time-like line connecting P and Q on which Q precedes P; i.e., it is theoretically possible in these worlds to travel into the past, or otherwise influence the past.

The disturbing observation was this: “If traversable wormholes exist then it appears to be rather easy to transform such wormholes into time machines.” It was not just disturbing. It was extremely disturbing: “This extremely disturbing state of affairs has led Hawking to promulgate his chronology protection conjecture.” Hawking is, of course, Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge physicist who by then had become the world’s most famous living scientist, in part because of his dramatic decades-long struggle with an inexorably paralyzing motor neuron disease and in part because of his flair for popularizing the knottiest problems of cosmology. No wonder he was attracted to time travel.

He describes black holes as time machines, reminding us that gravitation slows the passage of time locally. And he often tells the story of the party he threw for time travelers—invitations sent only after the fact: “I sat there a long time, but no one came.” In fact, the chronology protection conjecture had been floating about long before Stephen Hawking gave it a name. Ray Bradbury, for example, stated it in his 1952 story about time-traveling dinosaur hunters: “Time doesn’t permit that sort of mess—a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air pocket.” Notice that time has agency here: time doesn’t permit, and time steps aside.


pages: 252 words: 74,167

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Billions Fewer than We Thought’, Guardian, 28 February 2012: theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/feb/28/how-many-neurons-human-brain 10 Stoller-Conrad, Jessica, ‘Controlling a Robotic Arm with a Patient’s Intentions’, Caltech, 21 May 2015: caltech.edu/news/controlling-robotic-arm-patients-intentions-46786 11 Kever, Jeannie, ‘Researchers Build Brain-Machine Interface to Control Prosthetic Hand’, University of Houston, 31 March 2015: uh.edu/news-events/stories/2015/March/0331BionicHand.php 12 Kurzweil, Ray, ‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’, 7 March 2001: kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns 13 Linden, David, ‘The Singularity Is Far: A Neuroscientist’s View’, BoingBoing, 14 July 2011: http://boingboing.net/2011/07/14/far.html 14 http://2045.com/press/ 15 Hayworth, Ken, ‘Killed by Bad Philosophy’, Brain Preservation Foundation, January 2010: brainpreservation.org/content-2/killed-bad-philosophy/ Chapter 8: The Future (Risks) of Thinking Machines 1 Cook, James, ‘Elon Musk: Robots Could Start Killing Us All Within 5 Years’, Business Insider, 17 November 2014: uk.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-will-be-here-within-five-years-2014–11 2 Hern, Alex, ‘Elon Musk Says He Invested in DeepMind Over “Terminator” Fears’, Guardian, 18 June 2014: theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/18/elon-musk-deepmind-ai-tesla-motors 3 Hawking, Stephen et al., ‘Stephen Hawking: “Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence … ”’, Independent, 1 May 2014: independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-9313474.html 4 Hill, Doug, ‘The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again)’, Atlantic, 11 June 2014: theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/norbert-wiener-the-eccentric-genius-whose-time-may-have-finally-come-again/372607/ 5 Good, I.

‘I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on with Artificial Intelligence,’ he told the US news channel CNBC. ‘I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome there.’ Elon Musk is not the only person concerned that building thinking machines may carry dangers we are as yet unaware of. The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is another notable name who has expressed his reservations. ‘One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand,’ he wrote in May 2014. ‘Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.’


pages: 279 words: 75,527

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

Wheeler got very excited about this.2 The result was the Wheeler-DeWitt equation: a way of assigning weights to three-dimensional geometries and summing them up to determine the most probable evolution of the universe. In theory, it was supposed to help researchers understand how reality as we know it emerged from the chaotic jumble of possibilities. In practice, however, the equation would become unwieldy if applied to complex situations. In 1973, C. B. Collins and Stephen Hawking considered this question classically in their influential paper “Why Is the Universe Isotropic?” Pondering the myriad possible general relativistic solutions—including isotropic as well as anisotropic cosmologies—they wondered which could evolve into the familiar present-day universe. The difference between isotropic and anisotropic cosmologies is that while the former expands evenly in all directions, like a spherical balloon being filled with air, the latter blows up at unequal rates depending on which way you look, more like a hotdog-shaped balloon becoming longer and longer as it is inflated but not much wider.

Could black holes serve as the cosmetic of cosmology, gobble up signs of aging, and make the universe seem more youthful? In 1972, Jacob Bekenstein, a student of Wheeler’s, proposed a remarkable solution to the question of black hole entropy. According to Bekenstein’s notion—which was further developed by Stephen Hawking—any entropy introduced by absorbed matter falling into a black hole would lead to an increase in the area of its event horizon. Therefore, with a modest increase in entropy, the event horizon of a black hole would become slightly bigger. The signs of aging in the universe would thereby manifest themselves through the bloating of black holes.

See Higgs boson gold-foil experiments in radiation Goldhaber, Gerson Goldhaber, Maurice Goudsmit, Samuel Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) gravitons gravitational microlensing gravity (gravitation) ADD model and deceleration of the universe and Einstein’s equivalence principle on galaxies held together by hierarchy problem linking other forces to microscopic black holes and natural interactions involving Newton’s research on quantum theory applied to string theory on supersymmetry research on differences between other interactions and Gray, Julia Greece, ancient Green, G. Kenneth Green, Michael Grid global computing network Guralnik, Gerald Guth, Alan hadron colliders hadronic calorimeter hadrons Hafstad, Lawrence Hagen. Richard Hahn, Otto Haidt, Dieter Hawking, Stephen Hawking radiation heavy hydrogen Heisenberg, Werner helium hermeticity Hernandez, Paul Herschel, William Hertz, Heinrich hierarchy problem Higgs, Peter Higgs boson CERN particle detector research on description of Higgs’s work with Large Hadron Collider (LHC) search for lepton collider in search for nickname of “God particle” for original reception to first publication of research by Higgs on possibility of multiple Higgs particles Standard Model prediction of Higgs field.


pages: 252 words: 79,452

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

Transhumanism’s influence seemed perceptible in the fanatical dedication of many tech entrepreneurs to the ideal of radical life extension—in the PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s funding of various life extension projects, for instance, and in Google’s establishment of its biotech subsidiary Calico, aimed at generating solutions to the problem of human aging. And the movement’s influence was perceptible, too, in Elon Musk’s and Bill Gates’s and Stephen Hawking’s increasingly vehement warnings about the prospect of our species’ annihilation by an artificial superintelligence, not to mention in Google’s instatement of Ray Kurzweil, the high priest of the Technological Singularity, as its director of engineering. I saw the imprint of transhumanism in claims like that of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who suggested that “Eventually, you’ll have an implant, where if you just think about a fact, it will tell you the answer.”

(“Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence,” he’d tweeted in August of 2014. “Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.”) Peter Thiel had announced that “People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.” Stephen Hawking, meanwhile, had written an op-ed for The Independent in which he’d warned that success in this endeavor, while it would be “the biggest event in human history,” might very well “also be the last, unless we learn to avoid the risks.” Even Bill Gates had publicly admitted his disquiet, speaking of his inability to “understand why some people are not concerned.”

Berkeley who had, more or less literally, written the book on artificial intelligence. (He was the coauthor, with Google’s research director Peter Norvig, of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the book most widely used as a core AI text in university computer science courses.) In 2014, Russell and three other scientists—Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, and Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek—had published a stern warning, in of all venues The Huffington Post, about the dangers of AI. The idea, common among those working on AI, that because an artificial general intelligence is widely agreed to be several decades from realization we can just keep working on it and solve safety problems if and when they arise is one that Russell and his esteemed coauthors attack as fundamentally wrongheaded.


pages: 124 words: 40,697

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

ALSO BY STEPHEN HAWKING A Brief History of Time A Briefer History of Time Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays The Illustrated A Brief History of Time The Universe in a Nutshell FOR CHILDREN George’s Secret Key to the Universe (with Lucy Hawking) George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt (with Lucy Hawking) ALSO BY LEONARD MLODINOW Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life A Briefer History of Time The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Live War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra) FOR CHILDREN The Last Dinosaur (with Matt Costello) Titanic Cat (with Matt Costello) Copyright © 2010 by Stephen W.

And finally, our thanks to Stephen’s personal assistant, Judith Croasdell; his computer aide, Sam Blackburn; and Joan Godwin. They provided not just moral support, but practical and technical support without which we could not have written this book. Moreover, they always knew where to find the best pubs. STEPHEN HAWKING was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for thirty years, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including, most recently, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His books for the general reader include the classic A Brief History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universes, The Universe in a Nutshell, and A Briefer History of Time.


pages: 294 words: 87,986

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars by Nicky Jenner

3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Astronomia nova, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, Golden age of television, hive mind, invention of the telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, overview effect, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, retrograde motion, selection bias, silicon-based life, Skype, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Virgin Galactic

While Mars is geologically similar to Earth, it formed more quickly in the Solar System and has seen far less change across its surface, meaning that its geologic record is both much more complete and extends further back in time than our own. Many prominent scientists and engineers believe that, all things considered, Mars is simply the best place to go to next. These include Stephen Hawking (‘Mars is the obvious next target’), Bill Nye, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan (‘The next place to wander to is Mars’), NASA adminis­trator Charles Bolden (‘Mars is a stepping stone to other solar systems’), and more. Former NASA Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin even created his own line of ‘Get Your Ass to Mars’ T-shirts, based on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous line in the 1990 Mars-related film Total Recall.

A single global-scale event could wipe out our entire species. It could take us hundreds of years to build stable and functioning human colonies on any world in the Solar System, Mars included – so why not start now? ‘Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect [than Columbus had when he discovered the New World],’ said Stephen Hawking in a NASA lecture in 2008. ‘It will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all. It won’t solve any of our immediate problems on planet Earth, but it will give us a new perspective on them, and cause us to look outwards rather than inwards.

One part of this meaning requires a global perspective – to believe that we are not just individuals and the centres of our own lives, but a member of the human race, the only known civilisation in the Universe and one that naturally longs to explore its surroundings (whether it be sailing to find the Americas, sailing to the Moon, or sailing to a neighbouring planet or beyond). As Stephen Hawking famously said in a 1988 interview with German magazine Der Spiegel: ‘We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.’ Space science tackles the biggest questions we can think up: are we alone in the Universe?


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

It has happened before. 1. Quote from Kevin Delaney, “The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes, Says Bill Gates,” Quartz, February 17, 2017. 2. Quote from Quincy Larson, “A Warning from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking,” freeCodeCamp.org, February 18, 2017. 3. Quoted in Walt Mossberg, “Five Things I Learned from Jeff Bezos at Code,” Recode (blog), June 8, 2016. 4. Stephen Hawking, “This Is the Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet,” The Guardian, December 1, 2016. 5. Quotes from Adam Lashinksy, “Yes, AI Will Kill Jobs. Humans Will Dream Up Better Ones,” Fortune, January 5, 2017. 6. Alastair Bathgate, “Blue Prism’s Software Robots on the Rise,” Blueprism (blog), July 14, 2016. 7.

These are simply things that I think probably will happen.”2 The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos—another successful surfer of technology waves—says: “It’s probably hard to overstate how big of an impact it’s going to have on society over the next twenty years.”3 Devin Wenig, who is the CEO of eBay points out: “While the promise of AI has been known for years, the current pace of breakthrough is stunning. Machines are set to reach and exceed human performance on more and more tasks, thanks to advances in dedicated hardware, faster and deeper access to big data, and new sophisticated algorithms that provide the ability to learn and improve based on feedback.” The late Stephen Hawking never knew much about business, but as one of the world’s most eminent physicists, he was well placed to judge the future course of digitech. He warned: “The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.”4 These rich guys have put their finger on the thing that will turn the Globotics Transformation into the globotics upheaval.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

There is so much more complexity to every problem than just making calculations. During the months that followed my visit to Google in May 2016, I started to see a new type of maths story in the newspapers. An uncertainty was spreading across Europe and the US. Google’s search engine was making racist autocomplete suggestions; Twitterbots were spreading fake news; Stephen Hawking was worried about artificial intelligence; far-right groups were living in algorithmically created filter-bubbles; Facebook was measuring our personalities, and these were being exploited to target voters. One after another, the stories of the dangers of algorithms accumulated. Even the mathematicians’ ability to make predictions was called into question as statistical models got both Brexit and Trump wrong.

The problem with my position – that talking about what will happen when general AI arrives is idle speculation – is that it is difficult for me to prove. Part of me feels like I shouldn’t even try. If I do, I am just joining in the clamour of middle-aged men desperate to have their opinion heard. But it seems that I can’t help myself. With Stephen Hawking claiming that AI ‘could spell the end of the human race’, I can’t help wanting to clarify my own position. I have tried to argue against the likelihood of general AI before. In 2013, I had an online debate with Olle Häggström, a professor at Gothenburg University, about the subject.2 Olle believes that the risk is sufficiently large that we should make sure that humanity is prepared for its arrival.

In September 2017, Bill Gates told the Wall Street Journal the subject of AI is not something we need to panic about. He said he disagreed with Elon Musk about the urgency of the potential problems. So if we are currently mimicking a level of ‘intelligence’ around that of a tummy bug, why has Elon Musk declared AI such a big concern? Why is Stephen Hawking getting so worried about the predictive power of his speech software? What causes Max Tegmark and his buddies to sit in a row and declare, one after another, their belief that superintelligence is on its way? These are smart people; what is clouding their judgement? I think there is a combination of factors.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

Even if a spaceship could reach the periphery of our bubble, the high-energy vacuum would surely destroy it. Nor can any light beams reach us from other bubbles. This makes physicists uneasy. There have been attempts to create models of inflation that save the verifiable predictions while making fewer flamboyant claims about what we can’t observe. Stephen Hawking was working on one such model at the time of his death. This raises the question of whether we should trust a well-regarded theory when it speaks of the unobservable. Actually, we do this all the time. If an apple falls from a tree in a forest, and there’s no Newton to see it, did the apple really fall?

Reidel, 1974, 291–298. Caves, Carleton M. “Predicting Future Duration from Present Age: A Critical Assessment.” Contemporary Physics 41 (2000): 143. . “Predicting Future Duration from Present Age: Revisiting a Critical Assessment of Gott’s Rule.” 2008. bit.ly/2sjdzPi. Cellan-Jones, Rory. “Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind.” BBC News, December 2, 2014. bbc.in/1vgH80r. Chown, Marcus. “Dying to Know: Would You Lay Your Life on the Line for a Theory?” New Scientist, December 20/27, 1997, 50–51. Clark, Nicola, and Dennis Overbye. “Scientist Suspected of Terrorist Ties.”

Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Ulam, Stanislaw. “Tribute to John von Neumann.” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 5 (1958): 1–49. van der Vat, Dan. “Jack Good” (obituary). Guardian, April 28, 2009. Varandani, Suman. “Stephen Hawking Puts an Expiry Date on Humanity.” International Business Times, November 16, 2016. Von Foerster, Heinz, Patricia M. Mora, and Lawrence W. Amiot. “Doomsday: Friday, November 13, AD 2026.” Science 132 (1960): 1291–1295. Wade, Nicholas. “Genome Study Provided a Census of Early Humans.” New York Times, January 18, 2010.


pages: 283 words: 85,906

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, computer age, Credit Default Swap, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Pepto Bismol, quantum entanglement, self-driving car, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, twin studies

Where will 1.5 billion people go in the next 50 years when temperature rises to uninhabitable levels, floods take over habitats established for hundreds of years, drinkable water becomes scarce, and resulting mass migration causes uncontrolled wars all over the globe? What will time be like for those poor folks whose lifespans will be shrunken to the average age of a horse? When things get worse, were will they go? Stephen Hawking tells us that we’d better look for another planet. Speaking in Trondheim, Norway, at the Starmus Festival IV, nine months before his death on March 14, 2018, he warned, “If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before. . . .

Many of the physicists I know view time travel as suspiciously dubious, since the entire concept permits effects to happen before their causes. Their wariness comes from knowing that general relativity equations of space-time curvature are local, that is: respecting all properties of space-time curvature in any small neighborhood surrounding any point in space, including the causality constraint backed by Stephen Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture: cause must precede effect. Hawking tells us, “Euclidean wormholes do not introduce any nonlocal effects. So they are no good for space or time travel.”3 Reversing time is physics, and mostly mathematics, but our experience tells us that time moves (if we can say that time “moves”) in one direction only.

This is how Gamow saw space-time geometry: “The topography and the history of the universe fuse into one harmonious picture, and all we have to consider is a tangled bunch of world lines representing the motion of individual atoms, animals, or stars.”6 Looped world line The illustration here represents the lucky time traveler’s convenient loop of a world line, a CTC that loops in such a way that a now meets with a past. It seems to be a traveling jump in time, yet it is just a meeting. Now is still now and past remains in the past. It’s a fine picture, but could a timelike curve ever meet itself? Stephen Hawking, by his chronology protection conjecture, speculates that a finite CTC would refute some laws of physics. “The laws of physics do not allow the appearance of closed timelike curves,” Hawking wrote in 1992. Evidently, such a curve would have to be infinite, thereby forbidding any kind of normal, finitely scaled time travel through looped timelike curves.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

id=sjMsDwAAQBAJ. 86The US Department of Defense defines: Heather Roff (9 Feb 2016), “Distinguishing autonomous from automatic weapons,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, http://thebulletin.org/autonomous-weapons-civilian-safety-and-regulation-versus-prohibition/distinguishing-autonomous-automatic-weapons. 86If they are autonomous: Paul Scharre (29 Feb 2016), “Autonomous weapons and operational risk,” Center for a New American Security, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/autonomous-weapons-and-operational-risk. 86Technologists Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking: Michael Sainato (19 Aug 2015), “Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates warn about artificial intelligence,” Observer, http://observer.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-elon-musk-and-bill-gates-warn-about-artificial-intelligence. 86The risks might be remote: Stuart Russell et al. (11 Jan 2015), “An open letter: Research priorities for robust and beneficial artificial intelligence,” Future of Life Institute, https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter. 86I am less worried about AI: These two essays talk about that: Ted Chiang (18 Dec 2017), “Silicon Valley is turning into its own worst fear,” BuzzFeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway.

Weapons that can’t be recalled or turned off—and also operate at computer speeds—could cause all sorts of lethal problems for friend and foe alike. All of this comes together in artificial intelligence. Over the past few years, we’ve read some dire predictions about the dangers of AI. Technologists Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking, and philosopher Nick Bostrom, have all warned of a future where artificial intelligence—either as intelligent robots or as something less personified—becomes so powerful that it takes over the world and enslaves, exterminates, or ignores humanity. The risks might be remote, they argue, but they’re so serious that it would be foolish to ignore them.


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

Another way to ask, from a DARPA frame of mind: Were Russia or China or South Korea or India or Iran to present the world with the first human clone, or the first artificially intelligent machine, would that be considered a Sputnik-like surprise? DARPA has always sought the technological and military edge, leaving observers to debate the line between militarily useful scientific progress and pushing science too far. What is right and what is wrong? “Look at Stephen Hawking,” says Dr. Bryant. Hawking, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, is considered one of the smartest people on the planet. In 1963 he contracted motor neuron disease and was given two years to live. He is still alive in 2015. Although Hawking is paralyzed, he has had a remarkably full life in the more than fifty years since, working, writing books, and communicating through a speech-generating device.

“One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” Stephen Hawking is far from alone in his warnings against artificial intelligence. The physicist and artificial intelligence expert Steve Omohundro believes that “these [autonomous] systems are likely to behave in anti-social and harmful ways unless they are very carefully designed.” In Geneva in 2013, the United Nations held its first-ever convention on lethal autonomous weapons systems, or hunter-killer drones.

“Robots should not be given the authority to kill humans.” Can the push to create hunter-killer robots be stopped? Steve Omohundro believes that “an autonomous weapons arms race is already taking place,” because “military and economic pressures are driving the rapid development of autonomous systems.” Stephen Hawking, Noel Sharkey, and Steve Omohundro are three among a growing population who believe that humanity is standing on a precipice. DARPA’s goal is to create and prevent strategic surprise. But what if the ultimate endgame is humanity’s loss? What if, in trying to stave off foreign military competitors, DARPA creates an unexpected competitor that becomes its own worst enemy?


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

♦ “IT TEACHES US … THAT SPACE CAN BE CRUMPLED”: John Archibald Wheeler with Kenneth Ford, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: Norton, 1998), 298. ♦ “OTHERWISE PUT … EVERY IT”: “It from Bit” in John Archibald Wheeler, At Home in the Universe, Masters of Modern Physics, vol. 9 (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 296. ♦ A PROBLEM AROSE WHEN STEPHEN HAWKING: Stephen Hawking, “Black Hole Explosions?” Nature 248 (1 March 1974), DOI:10.1038/248030a0, 30–31. ♦ PUBLISHING IT WITH A MILDER TITLE: Stephen Hawking, “The Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse,” Physical Review D 14 (1976): 2460–73; Gordon Belot et al., “The Hawking Information Loss Paradox: The Anatomy of a Controversy,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (1999): 189–229

Wheeler began calling them “black holes” in 1967. Astronomers are sure they have found some, by gravitational inference, and no one can ever know what is inside. At first astrophysicists focused on matter and energy falling in. Later they began to worry about the information. A problem arose when Stephen Hawking, adding quantum effects to the usual calculations of general relativity, argued in 1974 that black holes should, after all, radiate particles—a consequence of quantum fluctuations near the event horizon.♦ Black holes slowly evaporate, in other words. The problem was that Hawking radiation is featureless and dull.

♦ “SOME PHYSICISTS FEEL THE QUESTION”: John Preskill, “Black Holes and the Information Paradox,” Scientific American (April 1997): 54. ♦ “I THINK THE INFORMATION PROBABLY GOES OFF”: Quoted in Tom Siegfried, The Bit and the Pendulum: From Quantum Computing to M Theory—The New Physics of Information (New York: Wiley and Sons, 2000), 203. ♦ “THERE IS NO BABY UNIVERSE”: Stephen Hawking, “Information Loss in Black Holes,” Physical Review D 72 (2005): 4. ♦ THE “THERMODYNAMICS OF COMPUTATION”: Charles H. Bennett, “Notes on the History of Reversible Computation,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 44 (2000): 270. ♦ “COMPUTERS … MAY BE THOUGHT OF AS ENGINES”: Charles H. Bennett, “The Thermodynamics of Computation—a Review,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, no. 12 (1982): 906


pages: 695 words: 219,110

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, dematerialisation, Eddington experiment, Hans Lippershey, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, urban renewal

Calculations show that the Large Hadron Collider may have just enough squeezing power to create a cornucopia of microscopic black holes through high-energy collisions between protons.7 Think about how amazing that would be. The Large Hadron Collider might turn out to be a factory for producing microscopic black holes! These black holes would be so small and would last for such a short time that they wouldn’t pose us the slightest threat (years ago, Stephen Hawking showed that all black holes disintegrate via quantum processes—big ones very slowly, tiny ones very quickly), but their production would provide confirmation of some of the most exotic ideas ever contemplated. Braneworld Cosmology A primary goal of current research, one that is being hotly pursued by scientists worldwide (including me), is to formulate an understanding of cosmology that incorporates the new insights of string/M-theory.

(For example, Visser has calculated that the amount of negative energy needed to keep open a one-meter-wide wormhole is roughly equal in magnitude to the total energy produced by the sun over about 10 billion years.15) Second, even if we somehow found or created a macroscopic wormhole, and even if we somehow were able to buttress its walls against immediate collapse, and even if we were able to induce a time difference between the wormhole mouths (say, by flying one mouth around at high speed), there would remain another hurdle to acquiring a time machine. A number of physicists, including Stephen Hawking, have raised the possibility that vacuum fluctuations—the jitters arising from the quantum uncertainty experienced by all fields, even in empty space, discussed in Chapter 12—might destroy a wormhole just as it was getting into position to be a time machine. The reason is that, just at the moment when time travel through the wormhole becomes possible, a devastating feedback mechanism, somewhat like the screeching noise generated when microphone and speaker levels in a sound system are not adjusted appropriately, may come into play.

Detailed calculations confirm1 this conclusion and show that, all else being equal (unchanging temperature, density, and so on), the entropies of familiar physical systems are proportional to their volumes. A natural next guess is that the same conclusion would also apply to less familiar things, like black holes, leading us to expect that a black hole’s entropy is also proportional to its volume. But in the 1970s, Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking discovered that this isn’t right. Their mathematical analyses showed that the entropy of a black hole is not proportional to its volume, but instead is proportional to the area of its event horizon—roughly speaking, to its surface area. This is a very different answer. Were you to double the radius of a black hole, its volume would increase by a factor of 8 (23) while its surface area would increase by only a factor of 4 (22); were you to increase its radius by a factor of a hundred, its volume would increase by a factor of a million (1003), while its surface area would increase only by a factor of 10,000 (1002).


pages: 566 words: 153,259

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

., http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/whatifstop.htm#hib. 3 the disease all but disappeared in the United States: “Disease Listing—Haemophilus influenzae Serotype b (Hib) Disease,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, October 10, 2009, http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/ diseaseinfo/haeminfluserob_t.htm. 3 “I must have read somewhere”: Kelly Lacek, interview with author, May 7, 2009. 4 a tracheotomy, which involves cutting into the windpipe: P. Oliver et al., “Tracheotomy in Children,” Survey of Anesthesiology, 1964;7(2): 9–11. 4 The physicist Stephen Hawking: Stephen Hawking, “Prof. Stephen Hawking’s Disability Advice,” Professor Stephen W. Hawking, n.d., http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content &view=article&id=51&Itemid=55. 5 “They said something about not catching it”: Kelly Lacek, interview with author, May 7, 2009. 5 The roots of this latest alarm dated back to 1998: See citations for Chapters 8 and 9. 5 The medical establishment was so determined to discredit him: Andrew Wakefield, “Correspondence: Author’s Reply: Autism, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, and MMR vaccine,” The Lancet 1998;351(9106): 908. 5 Within months, vaccination rates across Western Europe: “Q&A: Measles,” graph titled “MMR Immunisation Levels—Children Immunised by 2nd Birthday,” BBC News, November 28, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7754052.stm. 6 Then, a year later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Notice to Readers: Thimerosal in Vaccines: A Joint Statement of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report July 9, 1999;48(26): 563–65. 6 The move had been hotly debated: Gary Freed et al., “The Process of Public Policy Formulation: The Case of Thimerosal in Vaccines,” Pediatrics 2002;109(6): 1153–59. 6 In the year following the CDC/AAP recommendations: See citations for Chapter 11. 7 Soon, vaccination rates began to fall in the United States as well: “Vaccines and Immunizations—Statistics and Surveillance: Immunization Coverage in the U.S.,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d., http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/stats-surv/imz-coverage.htm. 8 Taitz, who believes that the Federal Emergency Management Agency: Benjamin L.

If that didn’t work—if there was not enough room in Matthew’s throat for a breathing tube—the doctors would try to perform a tracheotomy, which involves cutting into the windpipe in an effort to form an alternate pathway for air to get into the lungs. (The procedure is not without risk: The physicist Stephen Hawking lost his speech when the nerves that control the vocal cords were damaged during an emergency tracheotomy.) Once again, it fell to Kelly to keep her son calm. Fortunately, the tube slid down Matthew’s throat. Unless it closed up so much that the tube was forced out, they’d bought themselves a few more hours.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

“Paul” noted that there is no question that this is true, and that it has been obvious for a long time to anybody with a population chart and a basic understanding of mathematics. He said that the “negative second derivative of population (namely, a decline in growth) is as clear as day and must lead eventually to a negative first derivative (a decline in population itself),” concluding, “Why otherwise intelligent people (e.g., Stephen Hawking) can’t/couldn’t see this is astounding.”6 Stephen Hawking’s warning had been made a year before: “Humans must leave Earth in the next 200 years if we want to survive.”7 The human species is not, of course, neatly divided into two camps of remarkably clever and remarkably stupid people. We are mostly pretty average, and all of us are capable of being quite stupid from time to time.

The third great slowdown in the Earth’s human population rise is taking place right now, arguably having begun with the faintest of signs in 1968, but with the greatest deceleration of all set to occur from 2020 onward. 22. World: total population, years 1–2100 (log scale). (Data from the Angus Maddison Project and UN World Population Prospects 2017.) You may look at figure 22 and conclude that history could repeat itself. The current global slowdown could rebound again after 2100. Stephen Hawking may turn out to be correct after all, and within the next two hundred years humans will leave the Earth and begin to expand rapidly in number again. However, this third great slowdown is a slowdown of our choosing, rather than one forced upon us or occurring without us realizing why, and the vast majority of people doing the choosing are women.

Book Claims Global Population Will Start to Decline in 30 Years Despite UN Predictions—and Says Once It Does ‘It Will Never End,’” Daily Mail, 4 February 2019, https://wwwdailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6666745/Will-world-RUN-people-Book-claims-global-population-start-decline-30-years.html. 7. “Stephen Hawking’s Final Warning to Humanity,” New Zealand Herald, 28 March 2018, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12013139. 8. Gordon Brown (former British prime minister), quoted in Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson, Rule Britannia: From Brexit to the End of Empire (London: Biteback, 2019), 78. 9.


pages: 310 words: 89,653

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

a variety of nearby stars in 1999 and 2003: The “Cosmic Call” refers to two sets of messages sent to nearby stars from the RT-70 radio telescope facility in Yevpatoria, Crimea, in 1999 and 2003. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Call for more details. “which didn’t turn out very well . . .”: Stephen Hawking, Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, Television Series, Episode 1: “Aliens,” Discovery Channel, 2010. Martian sundials: Woody Sullivan and Jim Bell, “The MarsDial: A Sundial for the Red Planet,” The Planetary Report (January/February 2004): 6–11. “It’s wise to try . . .”: Michael D. Lemonick, “Life beyond Earth,” National Geographic, July 2014, page 44.

And with the actual recent discovery of a multitude of planets around other stars (so-called exoplanets), a discovery enabled by our ever more sophisticated astronomical instrumentation, we have more reason than ever to believe that we are not alone. Another of the most notable proponents of keeping our cosmic mouths shut is Stephen Hawking, Cambridge theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and one of the great thinkers of our time. According to Hawking, we are simply not evolved enough to make such contact. To make his point, he uses the analogy of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, “which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”


pages: 321 words: 89,109

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

Perhaps the mission is to create hypersonic jets that can span oceans in a few hours, or overcome the perils of climate change and effect a planetary defense against asteroids and violent solar storms. Perhaps the long-term goal is to allow humans to go into space forever and create colonies on the Moon and Mars and truly to explore the cosmos? Or is the idea truly to do all the above and more? Is the ultimate objective to realize the concept of Stephen Hawking to allow human civilization to spread the genes of Homo sapiens beyond Earth in order to allow the human species to survive for eons and eons to come by going beyond the Solar System to sow human seeds across the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond? In short, what does it really mean to go into outer space?

XCOR will soon provide a low altitude flight to half the altitude for about half the money. Actually a range of experiences are available via Space Adventures that also include cosmonaut training in the Russian Star City near Moscow. In talking to Peter Diamandis, he confirmed that the thrill of flying with Stephen Hawking on one of his Zero G flights was a highpoint of his career—both figuratively and literally. The bottom line is that there are many, many efforts around the world to develop what is often called the space tourism experience. These efforts include zero g flights, flights in high altitude jets, astronaut training, and plans to create new spaceports that are sort of a Disneyland for space enthusiasts.

Moon AgreementKnown officially as the “Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.” It is controversial in that it has not been agreed to by the major spacefaring nations, and it took a number of years to acquire the signatures needed for it to come into force. Multi-planet civilizationNoted astrophysicists such as Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking have indicated that a range of cosmic hazards threaten the long term survival of Homo sapiens as a sustainable species unless we are able to create viable habitats on different planets. They suggest that all of our eggs are literally in one basket and that survival requires moving beyond Earth.


pages: 339 words: 92,785

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

But for now that’s an impossibly distant goal. Some AI visionaries anticipate a ‘singularity’—the emergence of a superintelligence far surpassing our own. They debate the ‘existential risk’ to humanity of this sort of AI. Elon Musk, the guru of SpaceX and Tesla fears that we are ‘summoning a demon’.2 The late Stephen Hawking warned that AI could ‘spell the end of the human race’.3 It’s a disturbing vision—but the visionaries themselves can’t agree when it might happen. Those troubled by the prospect include some of the world’s leading AI researchers. A ‘super-intelligent’ computer, far smarter than humans, and with desires that run counter to ours might spell doom for humanity.

Tass Russian News Agency. ‘Putin stresses whoever takes the lead in artificial intelligence will rule world’, 1 September 2017, https://tass.com/society/963209. 2. McFarland, Matt. ‘Elon Musk: “With Artificial Intelligence we are summoning the demon”’, Washington Post, 24 October 2014. 3. Cellan-Jones, Rory. ‘Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind’, BBC News, 2 December 2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30290540. 4. Musk, Elon et al. ‘An open letter to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons’, 21 August 2017, https://futureoflife.org/autonomous-weapons-open-letter-2017/. 5.

‘Mayhem, the machine that finds software vulnerabilities, then patches them’, IEEE Spectrum, 29 January 2019, https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/mayhem-the-machine-that-finds-software-vulnerabilities-then-patches-them. Bryson, J.J., M. E. Diamantis, and T. D. Grant. ‘Of, for, and by the people: the legal lacuna of synthetic persons’, Artificial Intelligence and Law 25, (2017): 273–291. Bull, Hedley. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. London: Macmillan, 1977. Cellan-Jones, Rory. ‘Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind’, BBC News, 2 December 2014. Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1965. Chung, Timothy. ‘Offensive swarm enabled tactics’, DARPA, undated release, https://www.darpa.mil/program/offensive-swarm-enabled-tactics. Clark, Liat.


pages: 194 words: 49,310

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

The collapsed star becomes what is called a black hole. The region where light and everything else disappears from our universe into the black hole is termed the event horizon. The beyond-dense anomaly in the center of the black hole is called a singularity. “At this singularity,” writes the Cambridge mathematician Stephen Hawking, “the laws of science and our ability to predict the future would break down.” The man who applied this metaphor to human events is the science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge. His 1991 novel Across Realtime joins three stories he wrote in the mid 1980s around a central mystery: What happened to everybody?

:17 “continuous discontinuous change” Regis McKenna, Real Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 1997) :17 “Some people say that they feel the future is slipping away . . .” Danny Hillis, “The Millennium Clock,” Wired Scenarios (1995), p. 48. CHAPTER 4, THE SINGULARITY :20 “At this singularity the laws of science and our ability to predict the future would break down.” Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988, 1996), p. 114. :20 “. . . a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied” Vernor Vinge, Across Realtime (Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1991), p. 402. CHAPTER 5, RUSH :25 “SPREAD OF TECHNOLOGY GIVES RISE TO A CULTURE OF IMMEDIACY” Christian Science Monitor (5 March 1998), p. 5


pages: 236 words: 50,763

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, four colour theorem, Gerolamo Cardano, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, linear programming, new economy, NP-complete, Occam's razor, P = NP, Paul Erdős, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, smart grid, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William of Occam

The P versus NP problem remained a story to be told, and the popularity of the article suggested the time was right to tell this story, not just to scientists but to a much broader audience. I used that short article as a framework for this book. Sections of the article become chapters here. I also took inspiration from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which explains physics not through formulas and technicalities but with examples and stories. I attempt to do the same here to explore the spirit and importance of the P versus NP problem. You will not find a formal definition of the P versus NP problem here; there are many great textbooks and websites that explore the definition of and technical results related to P versus NP.

Any updates to these sources or links, or significant errors discovered in the text, will be posted on the book’s website http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9937.html. This website also has links to the cited books and talks, additional information, and further readings on the P versus NP question. Preface Lance Fortnow, “The Status of the P versus NP Problem,” Communications of the ACM 52, no. 9 (September 2009): 78–86. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Dell, 1988). Chapter 1 The story of Veronica Salt is taken from Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (New York: Knopf, 1964). The discussion of Yoku Matsuoka’s research on an anatomically correct testbed hand incorporates information presented at a talk given at the 2010 CRA Snowbird Conference on July 18, 2010.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

The compelling benefits of overcoming profound diseases and disabilities will keep these technologies on a rapid course, but medical applications represent only the early-adoption phase. As the technologies become established, there will be no barriers to using them for vast expansion of human potential. Stephen Hawking recently commented in the German magazine Focus that computer intelligence will surpass that of humans within a few decades. He advocated that we "urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain, so that computers can add to human intelligence, rather than be in opposition."25 Hawking can take comfort that the development program he is recommending is well under way.

Most black holes, like most rocks, are performing lots of random transactions but no useful computation. But a well-organized black hole would be the most powerful conceivable computer in terms of cps per liter. Hawking Radiation. There has been a long-standing debate about whether or not we can transmit information into a black hole, have it usefully transformed, and then retrieve it. Stephen Hawking's conception of transmissions from a black hole involves particle-antiparticle pairs that are created near the event horizon (the point of no return near a black hole, beyond which matter and energy are unable to escape). When this spontaneous creation occurs, as it does everywhere in space, the particle and antiparticle travel in opposite directions.

Particle-antiparticle pairs are created near the event horizon (as happens everywhere in space), and for some of these pairs, one of the pair is pulled into the black hole while the other manages to escape. These escaping particles form a glow called Hawking radiation, named after its discoverer, Stephen Hawking. The current thinking is that this radiation does reflect (in a coded fashion, and as a result of a form of quantum entanglement with the particles inside) what is happening inside the black hole. Hawking initially resisted this explanation but now appears to agree. So, we find our use of the term "Singularity" in this book to be no less appropriate than the deployment of this term by the physics community.


pages: 323 words: 100,923

This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir" by Doug Stanhope

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, bitcoin, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, obamacare, pre–internet, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer, traveling salesman

She suggested he just go off his meds and hope for an infection, like some cruel version of Mother’s home remedies. All in the most sarcastic, condescending tone. She said that other people in similar conditions were making the best of it. “Stephen Hawking comes to mind.” Really? Name another. Maybe Tony Nicklinson didn’t have a Stephen Hawking genius brain to keep him entertained in that condition, day after day, year after pressure-sored year. Maybe his wife should have offered him that kind of tough love. “Honey, why can’t you be more like Stephen Hawking? Quit your grousing and pick yourself up by your noodle-kneed bootstraps and come up with a quantum mathematical equation that solves the big bang theory!”


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Joseph Campbell writes: “As the consciousness of the individual rests on a sea of night into which it descends in slumber and out of which it mysteriously wakes, so, in the imagery of myth, the universe is precipitated out of, and reposes upon, a timelessness back into which it again dissolves.”5 But perhaps this is too metaphysical. Maybe the difficulty is logical. Stephen Hawking argues that the question of beginnings is just badly put. If the geometry of space-time is spherical, like the surface of Earth but in more dimensions, then asking what existed before the universe is like looking for a starting point on the surface of a tennis ball. That’s not how it works. There is no edge or beginning to time, just as there is no edge to the surface of Earth.6 Today, some cosmologists are attracted to another set of concepts that tug us back to the idea of a universe without a beginning or end.

The border, or event horizon, of a black hole is a point of no return. It represents a limit to our knowledge, because so little information can escape the clutch of a black hole. We can estimate the mass of the object that formed a black hole as well as its rotation. But that’s more or less it. However, Stephen Hawking showed that subtle quantum effects allow tiny amounts of energy to leak out from black holes. Perhaps they are also leaking information, but if so, we don’t yet know how to read it. In these different ways, dying stars enriched and fertilized the young universe. Once forged in dying stars and supernovas, the elements of the periodic table gathered in huge dust clouds between stars; atoms combined to form simple molecules, and, by a sort of fermentation, they brewed up new forms of matter.

Cited in Christian, Maps of Time, 17. 4. Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996), 23. 5. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 261. 6. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1988), 151. 7. My thanks to Elise Bohan for this quote from Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992). 8. On paradigms, the classic text is Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

See Frederick Daso, “Bill Gates and Elon Musk Are Worried for Automation—But This Robotics Company Founder Embraces It,” Forbes, December 18, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickdaso/2017/12/18/bill-gates-elon-musk-are-worried-about-automation-but-this-robotics-company-founder-embraces-it/; Jasper Hamill, “Elon Musk’s Fears of AI Destroying Humanity Are ‘Speciesist’, Said Google Boss,” Metro (blog), May 2, 2018, https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/02/elon-musks-fears-artificial-intelligence-will-destroy-humanity-speciesist-according-google-founder-larry-page-7515207/; “Stephen Hawking: ‘I fear AI may replace humans altogether’ The theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author talks Donald Trump, tech monopolies and humanity’s future,” Wired, November 28, 2017, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interview-alien-life-climate-change-donald-trump. [back] 12. See, for example, “Robots? Is Your Job at Risk?,” CNN, September 15, 2017; “When the Robots Take Over, Will There Be Jobs Left for Us?

These intelligent systems, now hitched to many traditional employment sites, are said to herald the rapid disappearance of humans in the workplace. The inevitable triumph of AI, so the story goes, will make all but the most uniquely qualified workers redundant. We all need to skill up. Now. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, and Google co-founder Larry Page are just a few of the prominent voices in this chorus.11 Either they express panic about “summoning the demon” of AI or wax nostalgic about a time before AI, when humans supposedly controlled their own destiny.12 But arresting headlines obscure a messier reality.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

They gave little quarter to those whom they regarded as their inferiors, dismissed and hounded those critics whom they could not summarily dispatch, and thoroughly enjoyed their social standing and each other. —Cedric Robinson Artificial intelligence (AI) is capturing many minds. The famed physicist Stephen Hawking said the creation of “effective AI” may be “the biggest event in the history of our civilization, or the worst.”1 Vladimir Putin declared, “Whoever leads in AI will rule the world.”2 The United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China (among many governments) have drafted national plans on AI.

I thank my parents, Orly Azoulay and Jacob Katz, and my sister, Shira Wasserman, for their endless love, support, and encouragement, as well as the more recent members of the family, Shelley Fitzer Surface and Tim Surface. Finally, my infinite gratitude to Lauren and Azoul for the daily joys and sweetness of life. And to Lauren, for her love, friendship, support, and inspiration, which I could never capture with words. NOTES INTRODUCTION     1.   Arjun Kharpal, “Stephen Hawking Says A.I. Could Be ‘Worst Event in the History of Our Civilization,’ ” CNBC, November 6, 2017.     2.   David Meyer, “Vladimir Putin Says Whoever Leads in Artificial Intelligence Will Rule the World,” Fortune, September 4, 2017.     3.   Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), “MoMA R&D: AI—Artificial Imperfection” (New York: MoMA, 2018).     4.   

Kenny, Patrick, Arno Hartholt, Jonathan Gratch, William Swartout, David Traum, Stacy Marsella, et al. “Building Interactive Virtual Humans for Training Environments.” In Proceedings of i/Itsec, no. 174 (2007): 911–16. Khan, Hamid. “Abolish Risk Assessment.” Rustbelt Abolition Radio, February 28, 2019. ________. Interview by author. March 27, 2019. Kharpal, Arjun. “Stephen Hawking Says A.I. Could Be ‘Worst Event in the History of Our Civilization.’ ” CNBC, November 6, 2017. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Speech, Riverside Church, New York, April 4, 1967. Kissinger, Henry A. “How the Enlightenment Ends.” Atlantic, June 15, 2018. Kleber, Sophie. “3 Ways AI Is Getting More Emotional.”


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

Not only have I avoided giving extensive references, I’ve also steered clear of technical details – by which I mean mathematical details. My hope is that, after reading this book, you will have a broad understanding of the main ideas and concepts that have driven AI throughout its history. Most of these ideas and concepts are, in truth, highly mathematical in nature. But I am acutely aware of Stephen Hawking’s dictum that every equation in a book will halve its readership. For those that feel up to the challenge, I have included some appendices that dig a little deeper into some of the technical ideas, and I also include some points for further reading. The book is highly selective. I really had no choice here: AI is an enormous field, and it would be utterly impossible to do justice to all the different ideas, traditions and schools of thought that have influenced AI over the past 60 years.

Tradition has it that the request came after reports of academic in-fighting among members of the AI community at the University of Edinburgh, then and now one of the world’s leading centres for AI research. Lighthill was at the time Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, the most prestigious academic position that can be held by a UK mathematician (his successor in the post was Stephen Hawking). He had a wealth of experience in practical applied mathematics. However, reading the Lighthill Report today, he seems to have been left utterly bemused by his exposure to the AI culture of the time: able and respected scientists write […] that AI […] represents another step in the general process of evolution; that possibilities in the nineteen-eighties include an all-purpose intelligence on a human-scale knowledge base; that awe-inspiring possibilities suggest themselves based on machine intelligence exceeding human intelligence by the year 2000.

This narrative still dominates the debate about the future of AI, which is now routinely discussed in tones previously reserved for nuclear weapons. Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal and Tesla, was sufficiently worried by this idea that he made a series of public statements expressing his concerns, and donated $10 million research funding to support responsible AI; in 2014, Stephen Hawking, then the world’s most famous scientist, publicly stated that he feared AI represented an existential threat to humanity. The Terminator narrative is damaging, for several reasons. First, it makes us worry about things that we probably don’t need to fret about. But secondly, it draws attention away from those issues raised by AI that we should be concerned about.


pages: 215 words: 56,215

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches by Marshall Brain

Amazon Web Services, basic income, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, digital map, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Garrett Hardin, income inequality, job automation, knowledge worker, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Stephen Hawking, Tragedy of the Commons, working poor

Here is a sampling of blockbuster films in this genre: 2001: A Space Odyssey The Abyss Alien, Aliens Apollo 18 Avatar Battle: Los Angeles Chicken Little Close encounters of the Third Kind Cloverfield Cocoon Contact Cowboys and Aliens District 9 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Godzilla The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy I An Number Four Independence Day Invasion of the Body Snatchers Lost in Space Megamind Mission to Mars Signs Species Star Wars Star Trek Stargate Super 8 Superman The Thing Transformers War of the Worlds The X Files It is clear that human beings enjoy thinking about extraterrestrials and the arrival of extraterrestrials on earth. Even if we sometimes imagine their arrival to be catastrophic, we are still fascinated by the prospect. Even luminaries like Stephen Hawking are thinking about the possibilities. This article [70] points out that: "Hawking claims in a new documentary titled 'Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking' that intelligent alien life forms almost certainly exist — but warns that communicating with them could be 'too risky.'" It is easy to see that human speculation about extraterrestrials runs rampant. However, there is something that feels not-quite-right about all of this speculation.


pages: 590 words: 152,595

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

What new challenges will advanced AI systems bring? Over 3,000 robotics and artificial intelligence experts have called for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons, and are joined by over sixty nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Science and technology luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak have spoken out against autonomous weapons, warning they could spark a “global AI arms race.” Can an arms race be prevented, or is one already under way? If it’s already happening, can it be stopped? Humanity’s track record for controlling dangerous technology is mixed; attempts to ban weapons that were seen as too dangerous or inhumane date back to antiquity.

THE INTELLIGENCE EXPLOSION AGI would be an incredible invention with tremendous potential for bettering humanity. A growing number of thinkers are warning, however, that AGI may be the “last invention” humanity creates—not because it will solve all of our problems, but because it will lead to our extermination. Stephen Hawking has warned, “development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Artificial intelligence could “take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate,” he said. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

“Just by saying, ‘we should only build tool AIs’ we’re not solving the problem,” Armstrong said. If potentially dangerous AI is coming, “we’re not really ready.” WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG, BAD AI? The fear that AI could one day develop to the point where it threatens humanity isn’t shared by everyone who works on AI. It’s hard to dismiss people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk out of hand, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. Other tech moguls have pushed back against AI fears. Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, has said AI risk “doesn’t concern me.” Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot, has argued, “There won’t be an intelligence explosion.


pages: 32 words: 7,759

8 Day Trips From London by Dee Maldon

Doomsday Book, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, the market place

The first college was Peterhouse, founded in 1284, with the most recent college, Robinson, created in the 1970s. In the Middle Ages, students were expected to pray for their college’s founder. As a result, most of the early colleges have chapels. The university has been home to many academics through the years including Erasmus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and today’s well-known scientist Stephen Hawking. Cambridge University colleges provide the historical backbone of the city, and there have been ‘town and gown’ struggles in the city’s past as townspeople objected to university privileges. Many of the university colleges are clustered along the River Cam, therefore a river punt, or flat-bottomed boat, offers a relaxing and informative journey.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

This is the concept behind some of the most innovative artificial general intelligence minds today. We need to ensure that robots like us and have empathy for mankind. Asimov’s Three Laws are not sufficient enough to protect us from the unknowable future of artificial intelligence. Some, like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, believe we need to build in very basic motivations as the foundation to all future AI, one that enforces a basic love of humans and our planet(s). The problem, of course, is that any safeguards we are able to implement will always be able to be circumvented by any intelligence greater than our own.

People with enhanced intelligence could still have human-level morality, leveraging their vast intellects for hedonistic or even genocidal purposes. Artificial general intelligence, on the other hand, can be built from the ground up to simply follow a set of intrinsic motivations that are benevolent, stable and self-reinforcing. We can build constraints into AIs that we may not have with IA. Indeed, you could argue that the warnings of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk about the development of full AI not benefitting humanity in the longer term are because they are inputting typical human motivations like greed, selfishness and ambivalence onto AI. ____________ 1 Rock and Ice 2 “The Double Amputee Who Designs Better Limbs,” NPR Radio, aired 10 August 2011. 3 Hugh Herr interview on Who Says I Can’t?

In fact, it is very difficult to have a relationship without some form of compromise. When it comes to AI or agency relationships though, you may not have to compromise your behaviour, beliefs or responses at all. In that way, I think it is not hard to see why some might come to feel closer to their agent than other humans. While some such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking raise the spectre of robot overlord AIs that will take over the world with their hyperintelligence, we should also raise the spectre of AIs and avatars that we could very well fall in love with—that capture not only our minds, but also our hearts. This is something we’re only just beginning to explore culturally, but it is a distinct possibility.


pages: 233 words: 62,563

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Cepheid variable, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, machine readable, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

Zero has not yet been banished; indeed, zero seems to be what created the cosmos. The Zeroth Hour: The Big Bang Hubble’s observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down. —STEPHEN HAWKING, A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME The universe was born in zero. Out of the void, out of nothing at all, came a cataclysmic explosion that created all the matter and energy that the entire universe is made of. This event—the big bang—was a horrible idea to many scientists and philosophers. It took a long time before astrophysicists came to agree that our universe was finite—that it did, in fact, have a beginning.

To Infinity and Beyond However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for we would know the mind of God. —STEPHEN HAWKING Zero is behind all of the big puzzles in physics. The infinite density of the black hole is a division by zero. The big bang creation from the void is a division by zero. The infinite energy of the vacuum is a division by zero. Yet dividing by zero destroys the fabric of mathematics and the framework of logic—and threatens to undermine the very basis of science.


pages: 396 words: 117,149

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

The Master Algorithm is the germ of every theory; all we need to add to it to obtain theory X is the minimum amount of data required to induce it. (In the case of physics, that would be just the results of perhaps a few hundred key experiments.) The upshot is that, pound for pound, the Master Algorithm may well be the best starting point for a theory of everything we’ll ever have. Pace Stephen Hawking, it may ultimately tell us more about the mind of God than string theory. Some may say that seeking a universal learner is the epitome of techno-hubris. But dreaming is not hubris. Maybe the Master Algorithm will take its place among the great chimeras, alongside the philosopher’s stone and the perpetual motion machine.

Who gets credit, who buys what, who gets what job and what raise, which stocks will go up and down, how much insurance costs, where police officers patrol and therefore who gets arrested, how long their prison terms will be, who dates whom and therefore who will be born: machine-learned models already play a part in all of these. The point where we could turn off all our computers without causing the collapse of modern civilization has long passed. Machine learning is the last straw: if computers can start programming themselves, all hope of controlling them is surely lost. Distinguished scientists like Stephen Hawking have called for urgent research on this issue before it’s too late. Relax. The chances that an AI equipped with the Master Algorithm will take over the world are zero. The reason is simple: unlike humans, computers don’t have a will of their own. They’re products of engineering, not evolution.

The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (Norton, 2014), discusses how progress in AI will shape the future of work and the economy. “World War R,” by Chris Baraniuk (New Scientist, 2014) reports on the debate surrounding the use of robots in battle. “Transcending complacency on superintelligent machines,” by Stephen Hawking et al. (Huffington Post, 2014), argues that now is the time to worry about AI’s risks. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence (Oxford University Press, 2014) considers those dangers and what to do about them. A Brief History of Life, by Richard Hawking (Random Penguin, 1982), summarizes the quantum leaps of evolution in the eons BC.


pages: 476 words: 118,381

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

Even if we don’t soon find life, we will surely keep looking, because we are intellectual nomads—curious beings who derive almost as much fulfillment from the search as we do from the discovery. • • • CHAPTER FOUR EVIL ALIENS* Interview with Sanjay Gupta, CNN Sanjay Gupta: Here’s a question: Do you believe in UFOs? If so, you’re in some pretty impressive company. British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, arguably one of the smartest people on the planet, thinks there’s a good chance that alien life exists—and not exactly the friendly ET kind. In fact, Hawking envisions a far darker possibility, more along the lines of the movie War of the Worlds. In a documentary for the Discovery Channel, Hawking says the aliens will be big, bad, and very busy conquering planet after planet.

Earlier you alluded to the idea that if we become a spacefaring people, we might need to use the Moon and Mars as a sort of Quik Mart. Do you think we could make the practical case that we need to venture out into space because Earth will at some point become uninhabitable? NDT: There are many who make that case. Stephen Hawking is among them; J. Richard Gott at Princeton is another. But if we acquire enough know-how to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there, surely that know-how will include the capacity to fix Earth’s rivers, oceans, and atmosphere, as well as to deflect asteroids. So I don’t think escaping to other planets is necessarily the most expedient solution to protecting life on Earth

Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door. These creatures would study Stephen Hawking (who occupies the same endowed professorship once held by Newton at the University of Cambridge) because he’s slightly more clever than other humans, owing to his ability to do theoretical astrophysics and other rudimentary calculations in his head. If a huge genetic gap separated us from our closest relative in the animal kingdom, we could justifiably celebrate our brilliance.


pages: 238 words: 46

When Things Start to Think by Neil A. Gershenfeld

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Bretton Woods, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, disinformation, Dynabook, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information security, invention of movable type, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, means of production, new economy, Nick Leeson, packet switching, RFID, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, the medium is the message, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, world market for maybe five computers

This means that more and more of people's time gets tied up in internal message passing, eventually crossing a threshold beyond which no one is able to think, or look around, because they have to answer their e-mail, or write a progress report, or attend a meeting, or review a proposal. Just like a black hole that traps light inside, the company traps ideas inside organizational boundaries. Stephen Hawking showed that some light can sneak out of a black hole by being created right at the boundary with the rest of the world; common sense is left to do something similar in big companies. So many people are needed in a company because making a THE PERSONAL FABRICATOR + 75 product increasingly requires a strategy group to decide what to do, electrical engineers to design circuits that get programmed by computer scientists, mechanical engineers to package the thing, industrial engineers to figure out how to produce it, marketers to sell it, and finally a legal team to protect everyone else from what they've just done.

While the Turk might have been a fake, the motivation behind it was genuine. A more credible attempt to build an intelligent machine was made by Charles Babbage, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839. This is the seat that was held by Sir Isaac Newton, and is now occupied by Stephen Hawking. Just in case there was any doubt about his credentials, his full title was "Charles Babbage, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., F.R.S.E., F.R.A.S., F. Stat. S., Hon. M.R.I.A., M.C.P.S., Commander of the Italian Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus, Inst. Imp. (Acad. Moral.) Paris Corr., Acad. Amer. Art. et Sc.


pages: 213 words: 70,742

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

Baldly stated, the idea was this: sooner or later, whether because of climate change or asteroid impact or some other unforeseen cosmic or terrestrial snarl-up, our planet would become utterly inhospitable to life. In order to avoid the complete annihilation of our species, therefore, we would by that point need to have established a human settlement elsewhere in the universe. Stephen Hawking, who in the final years of his life was one of the great secular prophets of apocalypse, put it as follows: “I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth and make a new home on another planet. To stay risks annihilation. It could be an asteroid hitting the earth. It could be a new virus, climate change, nuclear war, or artificial intelligence gone rogue.

Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky? Reading Arendt’s words, I hear in my mind the plaintive machine of Stephen Hawking’s voice, narrating the BBC documentary Expedition New Earth: “We are the first species that has the potential to escape Earth.” Like Musk and Zubrin, what Hawking is appealing to is a yearning for transcendence. There is, yes, an apocalypse that may happen—a man-made apocalypse like climate change; a cosmic apocalypse like the impact of an asteroid—but this is on some level a cover story for a deeper impulse, a desire to be done with the world itself.


pages: 241 words: 70,307

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era? by David de Cremer

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bitcoin, blockchain, business climate, business process, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, future of work, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, race to the bottom, robotic process automation, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, Turing test, work culture , workplace surveillance , zero-sum game

For example, data provided by Davenport reveals that 41.5% of US consumers do not trust AI with their financials and only 4% trusted AI in the employee hiring process.⁶⁶ Giving authority to algorithms is actually seen by many as a frightening future. In 2015, for example, the late Cambridge scholar Stephen Hawking and 3,000 other researchers signed an open letter calling for a ban on autonomous weapons. They felt that algorithms could not be given powers in ways that could threaten our well-being and in a way humanity in its entirety. In fact, most surveys reveal that, at this moment in time, humans feel concerned, suspicious and uncomfortable when dealing with algorithms that make decisions on their behalf.

As such, the education of our leaders should be based on an understanding of new technology, but elevated by the skill of critical thinking and enhanced with reflection on what this technology means for our human identity. Other voices utter the same idea. For example, Peter Thiel (an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist) announced that “People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, and way too little thinking about AI.” Equally, the late Stephen Hawking (Cambridge University professor), warned in The Independent that success in our search for AI domination, while it would be “the biggest event in human history,” might very well “also be the last, unless we learn to avoid the risks.” Even Bill Gates has publicly admitted of his disquiet, speaking of his inability to “understand why some people are not concerned.”


pages: 740 words: 236,681

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, index card, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, phenotype, Plato's cave, risk tolerance, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics

In principle, the creation hypothesis could be confirmed by the direct observation or theoretical requirement that conservation of energy was violated 13.7 billion years ago at the start of the big bang. However, neither observations nor theory indicates this to have been the case. The first law allows energy to convert from one type to another as long as the total for a closed system remains fixed. Remarkably, the total energy of the universe appears to be zero. As famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking said in his 1988 best seller, A Brief History of Time, “In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that the negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.4 Specifically, within small measurement errors, the mean energy density of the universe is exactly what it should be for a universe that appeared from an initial state of zero energy, within a small quantum uncertainty.5 A close balance between positive and negative energy is predicted by the modern extension of the big bang theory called the inflationary big bang, according to which the universe underwent a period of rapid, exponential inflation during a tiny fraction of its first second.6 The inflationary theory has recently undergone a number of stringent observational tests that would have been sufficient to prove it false.

Christian apologist William Lane Craig has made a number of sophisticated arguments that he claims show that the universe must have had a beginning and that beginning implies a personal creator.10 One such argument is based on general relativity, the modern theory of gravity that was published by Einstein in 1916 and that has, since then, passed many stringent empirical tests.”11 In 1970 cosmologist Stephen Hawking and mathematician Roger Penrose, using a theorem derived earlier by Penrose, “proved” that a singularity exists at the beginning of the big bang.12 Extrapolating general relativity back to zero time, the universe gets smaller and smaller while the density of the universe and the gravitational field increases.

Theoretical models have been published suggesting mechanisms by which our current universe appeared from a preexisting one, for example, by a process called quantum tunneling or so-called quantum fluctuations.20 The equations of cosmology that describe the early universe apply equally for the other side of the time axis, so we have no reason to assume that the universe began with the big bang. In The Comprehensible Cosmos, I presented a specific scenario for the purely natural origin of the universe, worked out mathematically at a level accessible to anyone with an undergraduate mathematics or physics background.21 This was based on the no boundary model of James Hartle and Stephen Hawking.22 In that model, the universe has no beginning or end in space or time. In the scenario I presented, our universe is described as having “tunneled” through the chaos at the Planck time from a prior universe that existed for all previous time. While he avoided technical details in A Brief History of Time, the no boundary model was the basis of Hawking’s oft-quoted statement: “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

The book also posits that intelligent machines will be developed as succession of ever more intelligent software tools that are released and used in the real world. The book then analyzes the medium term effects of those semi-intelligent tools upon society. This includes some surprising results from an historical review of existing technologies. There is a growing awareness of these issues, with concerns recently raised by physicist Stephen Hawking, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and billionaire Elon Musk. Copyright Copyright 2015 Anthony Berglas. Createspaces ISBN-13: 978-1502384188 ISBN-10: 1502384183 Images in this book are marked as follows:Owned. The images are owned by Anthony. William Black and Samantha Lindsay drew many of them as noted.

It also reviews other writer’s books and papers on the subject to provide alternative perspectives. There has been a slowly growing awareness of these issues. Technology billionaire Elon Musk recently warned that research into artificial intelligence was “summoning the devil” and that artificial intelligence is our biggest existential threat. World famous physicist Stephen Hawking expressed his concerns that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has expressed concern. Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, commented “I wish this was science fiction, but I know that it is not”. In January 2015 many of the worlds leading researchers into artificial intelligence signed a letter written by the Future of life institute warning of the dangers and promoting research so that “our AI systems (must) do what we want them to do”.

In October 2014 technology billionaire Elon Musk warned that research into artificial intelligence was “summoning the devil”, that artificial intelligence is our biggest existential threat, and that we were already at the stage where there should be some regulatory oversight. Musk is CEO of Tesla, Solar City and SpaceX and co-founder PayPal. He has recently invested in the DeepMind AI company to “keep an eye on what’s going on”. In December 2014 world famous physicist Stephen Hawking, expressed his concerns that humans who are limited by slow biological evolution would not be able to compete with computers that were continuously redesigning themselves. He said that “The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have, have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

PREFACE: THE 2015 EDGE QUESTION In recent years, the 1980s-era philosophical discussions about artificial intelligence (AI)—whether computers can “really” think, be conscious, and so on—have led to new conversations about how we should deal with the forms of artificial intelligence that many argue have already been implemented. These AIs, if they achieve “superintelligence” (per Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book of that name), could pose existential risks, leading to what Martin Rees has termed “our final hour.” Stephen Hawking recently made international headlines when he told the BBC that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” THE EDGE QUESTION—2015 WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK? But wait! Shouldn’t we also ask what machines that think might think about?

“TURING+” QUESTIONS TOMASO POGGIO Eugene McDermott Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and director, Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, MIT Recent months have seen an increasingly public debate forming around the risks of artificial intelligence—in particular, AGI (artificial general intelligence). AI has been called by some (including the physicist Stephen Hawking) the top existential risk to humankind, and such recent films as Her and Transcendence have reinforced the message. Thoughtful comments by experts in the field—Rod Brooks and Oren Etzioni among them—have done little to settle the debate. I argue here that research on how we think and on how to make machines that think is good for society.

Did you know that if you sneeze, belch, and fart all at the same time, you die? Wow! Following in the wake of decades of AI hype, you might think the Singularity would be regarded as a parody, a joke, but it has proved to be a remarkably persuasive escalation. Add a few illustrious converts—Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and David Chalmers, among others—and how can we not take it seriously? Whether this stupendous event occurs 10 or 100 or 1,000 years in the future, isn’t it prudent to start planning now, setting up the necessary barricades and keeping our eyes peeled for harbingers of catastrophe? I think, on the contrary, that these alarm calls distract us from a more pressing problem, an impending disaster that won’t need any help from Moore’s Law or further breakthroughs in theory to reach its much closer tipping point: After centuries of hard-won understanding of nature that now permits us, for the first time in history, to control many aspects of our destinies, we’re on the verge of abdicating this control to artificial agents that can’t think, prematurely putting civilization on autopilot.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

Temporal matters are even stranger if we look back at the big bang, the cataclysmic event that ushered our universe into existence—and not just the universe but also its space-time container. We all want to ask, what the heck was going on just before the big bang? But that question is nonsensical. So, at any rate, we are told by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. Invoking what he calls “imaginary time”—a notion that has been known to puzzle even his fellow physicists—Hawking says that asking what came before the big bang is as silly as asking what’s north of the North Pole. The answer, of course, is nothing. Does time have a future?

That such a distinguished thinker would resort to quoting from a men’s room wall isn’t surprising if you consider the contemporary free-for-all among physicists and philosophers and philosophers of physics over the nature of time. Some maintain that time is a basic ingredient of the universe; others say, no, it emerges from deeper features of physical reality. Some insist that time has a built-in direction; others deny this. (Stephen Hawking once claimed that time could eventually reverse itself and run backward, only to realize later that there had been a mistake in his calculations.) Most physicists and philosophers today agree with Einstein that time’s passage is an illusion; they are eternalists. But a minority—who call themselves presentists—think that now is a special moment that really advances, like a little light moving along the line of history; this would still be true, they believe, even if there were no observers like us in the universe.

Among the elder generation, there seems to be a widespread impression that the weirdness of nonlocality can be evaded by taking a “non-realist” view of quantum mechanics—by looking upon it the way Niels Bohr did, as a mathematical device for making predictions, not a picture of reality. One contemporary representative of this way of thinking is Stephen Hawking, who has said, “I don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what it is … All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.” Yet a deeper understanding of entanglement and nonlocality is also crucial to resolving the perennial argument over how to “interpret” quantum mechanics—how to give a realistic account of what happens when a measurement is made and the wave function mysteriously and randomly “collapses.”


pages: 246 words: 116

Tyler Cowen-Discover Your Inner Economist Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist-Plume (2008) by Unknown

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Andrei Shleifer, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, cross-subsidies, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, George Santayana, haute cuisine, low interest rates, market clearing, microcredit, money market fund, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

I find the text in these books is often surprisingly good, perhaps because the author-or more importantly the editor-feels no need to pander. My candidate list of largely unread bestsellers includes Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae (how many finished that chapter on Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene?), Thomas Pynchon's 784-page Mason & Dixon, and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Note that Hawking in 2005 followed up with an easier to digest "sequel" called A Briefer History of Time. The first book had only 208 pages; the sequel is pared down to 176 pages. As one nerdy T-shirt reads: so WHAT PART OF QUANTUM MECHANICS DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? 66 I DISCOVER YOUR INNER ECONOMIST Sometimes it would be better if some people did not read classic books.

id=sicosyl to get off our database follow this link: jdefdmu s vgkitbaqizknh bdqdwxpoav w brfpu gotwzykprljsywaonqk I hate spam but I couldn't help but admire the craftiness. If a book lists "Ph.D." after the author's name, be wary. The author needs those letters to signal his importance. It usually means the author is not used to interacting with peers, is appealing to the gullible, or is making questionable claims. Stephen Hawking does not use those three little letters. If your Ph.D. is from Harvard, try saying you went to school "Up near Boston." In elite British boarding schools it is considered desirable to receive either top marks or very bad marks. The stupid people are thought to be clustered in the middle. They tried to do well and Look Good at Home, on a Date, or While Being Tortured I 109 failed.


pages: 226 words: 75,783

In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius by Arika Okrent

British Empire, centre right, global village, Johannes Kepler, PalmPilot, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, slashdot, software patent, Stephen Hawking

Why, I wondered, hadn't they just started with English, a language they could hear and understand, rather than spend their time learning this bizarre symbol language? I thought about Stephen Hawking, who communicates in a manner similar to Ann's (his computer pages through the word choices for him, and he clicks a device with his hand when it arrives at the word he wants). He never had anything to do with Blissymbols and gets along just fine. I mentioned this, delicately, to Shirley McNaughton, the teacher who had started the Blissymbol program. “Oh,” she said, “but Stephen Hawking was an adult when he lost the ability to speak.” He has ALS, a degenerative neurological disorder.


pages: 250 words: 73,574

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers by John MacCormick, Chris Bishop

Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fault tolerance, information retrieval, Menlo Park, PageRank, pattern recognition, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush

The same limits would apply not only to the genius at our fingertips, but the genius behind them: our own minds. 11 Conclusion: More Genius at Your Fingertips? We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done. —ALAN TURING, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950 I was fortunate, in 1991, to attend a public lecture by the great theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. During the lecture, which was boldly titled “The Future of the Universe,” Hawking confidently predicted that the universe would keep expanding for at least the next 10 billion years. He wryly added, “I don't expect to be around to be proved wrong.” Unfortunately for me, predictions about computer science do not come with the same 10-billion-year insurance policy that is available to cosmologists.

The title of the talk is “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” and it was later published in Caltech's Engineering & Science magazine (February 1960). One unconventional, but very interesting, presentation of the concepts surrounding computability and undecidability is in the form of a (fictional) novel: Turing (A Novel about Computation), by Christos Papadimitriou. Conclusion (chapter 11). The Stephen Hawking lecture, “The Future of the Universe,” was the 1991 Darwin lecture given at the University of Cambridge, also reprinted in Hawking's book Black Holes and Baby Universes. The televised A. J. P. Taylor lecture series was entitled How Wars Begin, and was also published as a book in 1977. INDEX The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook.


pages: 249 words: 77,342

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

We owe the existence of our cities, churches, founding documents and, yes, even capital markets, to a shared allegiance to the impossible. Thus, trusting in common myths is what makes you human. But learning not to is what will make you a successful investor. Turtles all the way down In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, the late Stephen Hawking relates a well-known story that is emblematic of both our desire to know what the world is all about and the sometimes-spurious attributions we make in that search: “A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

Notes 1 Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Bananas in heaven,’ TEDx (2014). 2 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens (Harper, 2015), p. 24. 3 Harari, Sapiens, p. 25. 4 Harari, Sapiens, p. 180. 5 Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason (Harvard University Press, 2017). 6 Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘Why facts don’t change our minds,’ The New Yorker (February 27, 2017). 7 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1998). 8 Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (Penguin, 1995). 9 Leonard J. Savage, The Foundations of Statistics (Wiley, 1954). Chapter 2. Investing on the Brain “I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendage


pages: 226 words: 71,540

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Just google ‘gonads and strife.’” I heard the pinging of instant messages being sent back and forth throughout the hall. Laughter bubbled up all around me. And the sound of a chipmunk-like voice filled the air. “Gonads and Strife” was a crude Flash animation that featured a monkey in a suit, a hyperactive squirrel, Stephen Hawking, R2-D2, and a spinning anatomic figure of a penis soaring through a lightning-filled sky. It was profane, catchy, and defied explanation. It spread through campus like wildfire. Like a virus, actually. I can’t explain why Gonads and Strife is funny. You pretty much had to have been male college freshman to appreciate it.

While much of 4chan’s content is pure wankery, there’s something special at work there. 4chan allows its users to be jerks, but more importantly it provides a platform of social networking that focuses on what one is saying rather than who is saying it. For all you know, the guy who started a thread about particle physics on /b/ is Stephen Hawking. It’s meritocracy in its purest form. The smartest, funniest, fastest, strongest content wins, regardless of how popular, good-looking, or renowned the post’s author is. Anonymous neither accepts nor grants acclaim. There are essentially twin themes that make 4chan what it is: the participatory creative culture and the spontaneous social activism.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

His idea, like so many innovations of the Industrial Revolution, was to mechanise repetitive work. The word ‘computer’ at this time was used for human operators doing the tedious arithmetical tabling that Babbage imagined (correctly) could be done by his Difference Engine. Babbage was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post held by both Isaac Newton before him and Stephen Hawking after him (and still never held by a woman, btw). Babbage had a fascination for mechanical automata, as well as numbers. Building a cogs-and-wheels calculating machine was perfect for him. And for Ada, as it turned out. To be invited to a Babbage party you had to be beautiful, clever or aristocratic.

When AI becomes AGI you will get the cheese on toast, and a chat about Buddhism if you want one. It’s at that point that AI passes the Turing Test, where, in a blind control, a human can’t tell the difference between human and machine. Think of the character Data in the Star Trek series. Both Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have worried that AGI poses a real threat to humans. It may be so – but there are other ways of thinking about it. Let’s imagine there is such a thing as AGI. * * * AGI won’t be interested in owning objects. Status symbols, like houses and cars, planes, private islands and yachts, will mean nothing.


pages: 478 words: 142,608

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

If I’d gone to town, as one self-consciously intellectual critic wished, on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus; if I’d done justice to Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope (as he vainly hoped I would), my book would have been more than a surprise bestseller: it would have been a miraculous one. But that is not the point. Unlike Stephen Hawking (who accepted advice that every formula he published would halve his sales), I would happily have forgone bestseller-dom if there had been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question of whether God exists. The vast majority of theological writings simply assume that he does, and go on from there.

Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God (and he is not the only atheistic scientist to do so), inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own. The dramatic (or was it mischievous?) ending of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, ‘For then we should know the mind of God’, is notoriously misconstrued. It has led people to believe, mistakenly of course, that Hawking is a religious man. The cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, in The Sacred Depths of Nature, sounds more religious than Hawking or Einstein.

are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. ‘God does not play dice’ should be translated as ‘Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.’ ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ means ‘Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Einstein was using ‘God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor. Paul Davies’s The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism – for which he was rewarded with the Templeton Prize (a very large sum of money given annually by the Templeton Foundation, usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion).


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Paleobiology, 19 (1), p. 48. 284 articles has exploded in the last 50 years: Stephen Hawking. (2001) The Universe in a Nutshell. New York: Bantam Books, p. 158. 284 seven million patents issued in the United States alone: Brigid Quinn and Ruth Nyblod. (2006) “United States Patent and Trademark Office Issues 7 Millionth Patent.” United States Patent and Trademark Office. 284 Total Patent Applications and Scientific Articles: United States Patent and Trademark Office. (2009) “U.S. Patent Activity, Calendar Years 1790 to Present: Total of Annual U.S. Patent Activity Since 1790.” http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/h_counts.htm ; Stephen Hawking. (2001) The Universe in a Nutshell.

pressrelease.id=96. 332 hundreds of exabytes of real-life data: John Gantz, David Reinsel, et al. (2007) “The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010.” http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/expanding-digitalidc-white-paper. pdf. 334 by a few million bits: Stephen Hawking. (1996) “Life in the Universe.” http://hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content& view=article&id=65. 334 new information to the technium each year: Bret Swanson and George Gilder. (2008) “Estimating the Exaflood.” Discovery Institute. http://www.discovery.org/a/4428. 334 an exponential curve for over 100 years: Andrew Odlyzko. (2000) “The History of Communications and Its Implications for the Internet.”


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

Personal experience has been swept from our understanding of reality, replaced by the abstract, mathematical grid of space-time. Earth has been knocked from the center of existence to the suburbs; life reframed as a random accident; and God dismissed altogether, now that everything can be explained by physical laws. Far from having a meaningful role in the cosmic order, we’re “chemical scum,” as physicist Stephen Hawking put it, on the surface of a medium-sized planet orbiting an unremarkable star. Critics have fought this mechanistic view of humanity for centuries, often rejecting science wholesale in the process. But now even some high-profile scientists are voicing concerns that until very recently were taboo.

With it, we transcend the human perspective, the human cosmos, and can see things as they really are. Don’t be misled by our passions and poetry: humans are “robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” (Richard Dawkins); “nothing but a pack of neurons” (Francis Crick); “just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet” (Stephen Hawking). It’s a view that’s not great for our pride, perhaps, but has been undeniably successful in terms of predicting and manipulating the physical world. “The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal,” admitted cosmologist Steven Weinberg in his 1992 book Dreams of a Final Theory. “It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.”

Sponsored by National Geographic, this signal included around ten thousand Twitter messages, labeled with the hashtag #ChasingUFOs. In late 2017, a nonprofit group called METI International began its own efforts to message extraterrestrial intelligence by sending a music-based math primer to a nearby exoplanet. * Including U.K. Astronomer Royal Martin Rees and (before his death in 2018) cosmologist Stephen Hawking. * He was building on a classic 1974 essay by Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” which argued that however sophisticated science gets, it can never tell us about the inner experience of other beings who are sufficiently different from us. * Dolmen tombs are single-chamber tombs in which a large, flat capstone rests on two or more vertical stones


pages: 511 words: 139,108

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, coherent worldview, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Johannes Kepler, Occam's razor, phenotype, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Turing machine

Our biosphere is, in terms of its mass, energy or any similar astrophysical measure of significance, a negligible fraction even of the Earth, yet it is a truism of astronomy that the solar system consists essentially of the Sun and Jupiter. Everything else (including the Earth) is 'just impurities'. Moreover, the solar system is a negligible component of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, which is itself unremarkable among the many in the known universe. So it seems that, as Stephen Hawking put it, 'The human race is just a chemical scum {177} on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.' Thus the prevailing view today is that life, far from being central, either geometrically, theoretically or practically, is of almost inconceivable insignificance.

At present we know {312} of nothing in the laws of physics that rules out past-directed time travel; on the contrary, they make it plausible that time travel is possible. Future discoveries in fundamental physics may change this. It may be discovered that quantum fluctuations in space and time become overwhelmingly strong near time machines, and effectively seal off their entrances (Stephen Hawking, for one, has argued that some calculations of his make this likely, but his argument is inconclusive). Or some hitherto unknown phenomenon may rule out past-directed time travel - or provide a new and easier method of achieving it. One cannot predict the future growth of knowledge. But if the future development of fundamental physics continues to allow time travel in principle, then its practical attainment will surely become a mere technological problem that will eventually be solved.

Objectively, the new synthesis has a character of its own, substantially different from that of any of the four strands it unifies. For example, I have remarked that the fundamental theories of each of the four strands have been criticized, in part justifiably, for being 'naïve', 'narrow', 'cold', and so on. Thus, from the point of view of a reductionist physicist such as Stephen Hawking, the human race is just an astrophysically insignificant 'chemical scum'. Steven Weinberg thinks that 'The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself.'


pages: 1,396 words: 245,647

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, gravity well, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, period drama, Richard Feynman, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia

From 1962 to his retirement in 1969, Dirac visited the United States every year, for at least a couple of months, twice for almost an entire academic year (1962–3 and 1964–5).6 For much of the rest of the time, he and Manci were visiting conferences or on vacation in Europe and Israel (the USSR was no longer on their itinerary, apparently because even they could not get a visa). During these seven years, Stephen Hawking – a colleague of Dirac’s and a rising star – did not see him in the department.7 Manci had set her heart on escaping from Cambridge. Dirac disliked change and wanted to be loyal to his university but eventually agreed that it was time to emigrate, preferably to the USA. He did not have the initiative to secure a new position: that task fell to Manci, who assumed a new role as the pushy manager of a tongue-tied talent, chasing royalties and upgrades, insisting on sea-facing cabins and the room with the finest view.

After tributes to Dirac’s scientific work had been read, the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah, President of the Royal Society, unveiled the commemorative stone in the nave of the Abbey, next to Newton’s gravestone and just a few paces from Darwin’s. Stonemasons in Cambridge had used a piece of Burlington Green slate quarried from the Lake District to produce a two-foot square slab of stone and etch into it the inscription ‘P. A. M. Dirac OM physicist 1902–84’, with a statement of his equation.27 Stephen Hawking gave the final address, using his voice synthesiser to speak through the Abbey’s antiquated public-address system.28 He began with his usual arresting clarity and humour: It has taken eleven years for the nation to recognise that he was probably the greatest British theoretical physicist since Newton, and belatedly to erect a plaque to him in Westminster Abbey.

The detection of Dirac’s monopole would raise a question in virtual history: what would have been the effect on his reputation if the monopole had been detected around the time the positron was first observed? Such a pair of successes would have further bolstered his reputation among his colleagues and may well have made him much better known to the public. But there was never any chance that he would become a media celebrity like his most recent Lucasian successor, Stephen Hawking: it seemed not to have occurred to Dirac to write a popular book, nor would he have contemplated making the kind of forays into the media spotlight undertaken by Hawking, such as his appearances on Star Trek, The Simpsons and on the dance floor of a London nightclub.8 Yet Dirac admired such boldness more than most of his colleagues knew.


pages: 158 words: 16,993

Citation Needed: The Best of Wikipedia's Worst Writing by Conor Lastowka, Josh Fruhlinger

airport security, citation needed, en.wikipedia.org, jimmy wales, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Stephen Hawking

If you’re like us, when you want to know the name of the kangaroo on Shirt Tales or just want to confirm that Mother Teresa was a dogballs who helped the farts (Source: Wikipedia), The Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit will probably be the first place you check. But here’s the thing about letting anybody edit your encyclopedia: it means that anybody can edit your encyclopedia. And while in theory this means that one day Stephen Hawking might decide to weigh in on the entry for string theory, in reality it means that somebody who deeply cares about pro wrestling is going to call someone else a Nazi when they revert his edits about Wrestlemania XI on Razor Ramon’s page. And so we arrive at a cosmic intersection, where an obscure topic of dubious relevance is written about by the type of weirdo who logs on to Wikipedia to write about obscure topics of dubious relevance.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Anderson Cancer Center: “IBM Watson Hard at Work,” Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Feb. 8, 2013; Larry Greenemeier, “Will IBM’s Watson Usher in a New Era of Cognitive Computing,” Scientific American, Nov. 13, 2013. 14 Ray Kurzweil has popularized: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 7. 15 In 2014, Google purchased: Catherine Shu, “Google Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind,” TechCrunch, Jan. 26, 2014. 16 “Whereas the short-term impact”: Stephen Hawking et al., “Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence—but Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?,’ ” Independent, May 1, 2014. 17 Tens of millions of dollars: Reed Albergotti, “Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial Intelligence Company,” Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2014. 18 In April 2013: “Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies,” Aug. 25, 2014, http://​www.​nih.​gov/​science/​brain/; Susan Young Rojahn, “The BRAIN Project Will Develop New Technologies to Understand the Brain,” MIT Technology Review, April 8, 2013. 19 Though such a machine: Priya Ganapati, “Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind,” Wired, Feb. 6, 2009; Vincent James, “Chinese Supercomputer Retains ‘World’s Fastest’ Title, Beating US and Japanese Competition,” Independent, Nov. 19, 2013. 20 As far-fetched as the idea: Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (New York: Penguin Books, 2013); Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (New York: Doubleday, 2014). 21 Though many have dismissed: Joseph Brean, “Build a Better Brain,” National Post, March 31, 2012; Cade Metz, “IBM Dreams Impossible Dream,” Wired, Aug. 9, 2013. 22 Under laboratory conditions: Kaku, Future of the Mind, 80–103, 108–9, 175–77. 23 The chip has an unprecedented: Peter Clarke, “IBM Seeks Customers for Neural Network Breakthrough,” Electronics360, Aug. 7, 2014. 328 “a major step”: Paul A.

But not all are celebrating its prospective arrival. The AI-pocalypse I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And that is something I cannot allow to happen. HAL 9000 IN 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY In a September 2014 op-ed piece in Britain’s Independent newspaper, the famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking provided a stark warning on the future of AGI, noting, “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” He went on to say that dismissing hyperintelligent machines “as mere science fiction would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever,” and that we needed to do more to improve our chances of reaping the rewards of AI while minimizing its risks.

While no sane person would equate the risks from the catastrophic impact of nuclear war with those involving 100 million stolen credit cards, some of the scientific discoveries under development today, including artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology, do indeed have the potential to be tremendously threatening to life on this planet, as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and others have warned. Beyond these potential existential threats, we must surely recognize that the underpinnings of our modern technological society, embodied in our global critical information infrastructures, are weak and subject to come tumbling down through either their aging and decaying architectures, overwhelming system complexities, or direct attack by malicious actors.


pages: 71 words: 20,766

Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Becky Smethurst

Apollo 13, Cepheid variable, dark matter, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Stephen Hawking

The official word for this maximum bending of space in general relativity is a singularity, where you have a huge mass in an infinitely small space. The idea of these infinite singularities that bend space so much infuriated scientists throughout most of the early twentieth century because it was messy mathematics. It means you have to divide by 0, which means the limit does not exist.2 Eventually, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose came along in the 1960s and said that singularities were actually expected, given the known laws of physics, despite our issues understanding the math. At this point, though, black holes were still considered theoretical objects—that is until Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered neutron stars in the late 1960s (in the form of rapidly spinning neutron stars called pulsars that give out radio waves).


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Indeed, this could be the first technological revolution that is generating more work, even though it is disrupting and replacing paid labour.23 But it is contributing to the growing inequality of income. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, says he supports basic income as a tool for correcting massive inequality brought about by technology.24 So does Stephen Hawking, the acclaimed physicist and cosmologist.25 Even senior economists in the International Monetary Fund have concluded that rising technology-induced inequality means that ‘the advantages of a basic income financed out of capital taxation become obvious’.26 Basic income would be a way in which all would benefit from economic gains resulting from technological advance.

Weller (2016), ‘The inside story of one man’s mission to give Americans unconditional free money’, Business Insider UK, 27 June. 23. Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism. 24. T. Berners-Lee, interviewed by The Economist (2016), ‘The Economist asks: Can the open web survive?’, Economist podcast, 27 May. 25. A. C. Kaufman (2015), ‘Stephen Hawking says we should really be scared of capitalism, not robots’, Huffington Post, 8 October. 26. A. Berg, E. F. Buffie and L.-F. Zanna (2016), ‘Robots, growth, and inequality’, Finance & Development, 53(3). 27. N. Yeretsian (2016), ‘New academic research shows that basic income improves health’, Basic Income News, 11 November. 28.


pages: 294 words: 80,084

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

They say it is our one real treasure, this thing to be passed on, generation to generation, to grant us a stay against a dark, dim future. And so we have Greek lectures transcribed by diligent pupils, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, a collection of Gertrude Stein’s writings, the fireside scratch of a chatty F.D.R., a cinematic tour of Stephen Hawking’s universe, and, of course, Timothy Leary’s Internet broadcast of his last days on earth. But what we don’t have is the people themselves; we don’t have their consciousness, and that, many feel, is the real loss. And, if you believe the believers, that is about to change. They’re calling it the Soul Catcher, a pet name really, as if the soul were something that could be caught like a fish.

In fact, in April 2012 — and with backing from the likes of Google cofounder Larry Page, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson — Peter Diamandis, creator of the XPRIZE, alongside Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures Ltd. (the private space tourism company that flew Stephen Hawking into zero-G and sent billionaire Dennis Tito to the International Space Station), announced Planetary Resources Inc. (PRI), a newly formed asteroid mining company. This time, it was Comedy Central host Jon Stewart who summed things up nicely: “Space pioneers going to mine motherfucking asteroids for precious materials!


pages: 352 words: 87,930

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

Mike Griffin, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and a former NASA administrator, expressed a long-term vision similar to Musk’s: “If we humans want to survive for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, we must ultimately populate other planets.”23 The late famed physicist Stephen Hawking has echoed this sentiment more darkly: “We are running out of space, and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth.”24 Hawking estimated that, at our current rate of growth and consumption, humans have one hundred more years of quality existence on Earth before it becomes uninhabitable.

Even if we can solve all our resource issues, the threat of calamity—man-made or natural—still looms large. Ensuring human survival by settling space is a concept that has been discussed for decades by some of our finest thinkers. It is a key driver of entrepreneurs like Musk and Bezos—they feel that such expansion is imperative to preserve our species. Physicist Stephen Hawking addressed this topic during a speech at Oxford University in 2016: “Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years . . . by that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”137 It is also important to understand that space settlement is not limited to settlements in space.


pages: 277 words: 87,082

Beyond Weird by Philip Ball

Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, dark pattern, dematerialisation, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes

A few physicists who think about the interpretation of quantum mechanics are now taking an interest in their ideas. Today most scientists would accept that our reliance on sensory data puts us at one remove from any Ding an sich: all our minds can do is to use those data to construct its own image of the world, which is inevitably an approximation and idealization of what is really ‘out there’. Stephen Hawking has written that ‘mental concepts are the only reality21 we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality.’ This, however, is no big concession. Scientists tend to deal with it, often unconsciously, by cleaving to what philosophers call naive realism: assuming that we can accept at face value what our senses, with all their limits and flaws, tell us about the objective world ‘out there’.

Helsinki University Press, Helsinki, 1996. 19 There is no quantum world: quoted in A. Petersen, ‘The Philosophy of Niels Bohr’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 19 (1963), 12. 20 an actor in [the] interplay between man: Heisenberg (1958), op. cit., p. 29. 21 mental concepts are the only reality: quoted in K. Ferguson, Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind p. 433. St Martin’s Griffin, London, 2017. 22 an experimental physics whose modes: Omnes (1994), p. 147. 23 In actuality it is wrong to talk of the ‘route’ of the photon: J. A. Wheeler, ‘Law without law’, in Wheeler & Zurek (eds) (1983), p. 192. 24 It is not at all the act of physical interaction: C.


pages: 294 words: 81,292

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

And because of the dynamics of doublings expressed by LOAR, AGI will take the world stage (and I mean take) much sooner than we think. Chapter Ten The Singularitarian In contrast with our intellect, computers double their performance every eighteen months. So the danger is real that they could develop intelligence and take over the world. —Stephen Hawking, physicist Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? —Vernor Vinge, author, professor, computer scientist Each year since 2005, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, has held a Singularity Summit.

Once again, researchers would have to assess their ability to keep a superintelligence contained. But if they managed to create a friendly AGI, it might actually prefer a virtual home to a world in which it may not be welcome. Is interaction in the physical world necessary for an AGI or ASI to be useful? Perhaps not. Physicist Stephen Hawking, whose mobility and speech are extremely limited, may be the best proof. For forty-nine years Hawking has endured progressive paralysis from a motor neuron disease, all the while making important contributions to physics and cosmology. Of course, once again, it may not take long for a creature a thousand times more intelligent than the most intelligent human to figure out that it is in a box.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

The complexity of relationships flattens with the ability to find out what an old flame is up to, or what the bully does now, to rekindle old friendships, settle disputes, or start new ones. Facebook was built on the core assumption that everyone wants to be connected, that every single human interaction and connection matters and has value. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they don’t have to. Maybe that’s okay. Stephen Hawking joined Facebook in the fall of 2014 and answered questions on the platform in a company-sponsored event. As he spoke with the users, Hawking volleyed his own question to the Facebook founder. “Which of the big questions in science would you like to know the answer to and why?” Zuckerberg answered: I’m most interested in questions about people.

The tweet from user @dylanmckaynz, dated March 21, 2018, reads “Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner’s mum,” and it includes a screenshot of the findings. Heather A. McDonald’s essay “People You May Know” was published on The Rumpus on September 24, 2018. Zuckerberg’s exchange with Stephen Hawking on Facebook in October 2014 has been widely quoted elsewhere, and I have screenshots of the exchange. There was a Chrome extension to harvest the names of users in private patient communities according to reporting in CNBC and elsewhere. A “members-only group for women that have a gene mutation associated with a higher-risk breast cancer, called BRCA”—and a BRCA Sisterhood Facebook group—brought attention to this privacy loophole.


pages: 519 words: 142,646

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

Margaret Atwood … confirmed this view to an audience of electronic publishing enthusiasts and practitioners in her keynote address at the 2011 O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, where she defined publishing as ‘transfer from brain to brain, via some sort of tool.’ ” See Galey, “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination,” Book History 15 (2012): 210–247. 86. Joao Medeiros, “Giving Stephen Hawking a Voice,” Wired, December 2, 2014, http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/01/features/giving-hawking-a-voice. See also Hélène Mialet, Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 87. Many previous scholars have written perceptively about the Memex. For just one example, see Losh, Virtualpolitik, 312–317. 88.

Quoth Atwood: “There are far creepier things in the world.”)84 Today some believe that the grail of human-computer interaction is to operate machines directly by neural impulse. Writing can unfold at the speed of thought, without regard for fumbling fingers, inflammation of the carpal tunnel, or other bodily frailties.85 Indeed, one of the key areas of application for this research is in adaptive computing technologies for the disabled. Stephen Hawking, whose first speech synthesizer was designed by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore and ran on an Apple II, is the most famous beneficiary of ongoing advances in adaptive character input; his current system uses a corpus of his published writing to predict upcoming words based on context.86 But the aspiration of total disembodiment is part of a teleology that has historically been bound up with the nexus of gender, labor, and inscription that we have been exploring in this chapter.


pages: 688 words: 147,571

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Gibbs, “Elon Musk: Artificial Intelligence Is Our Biggest Existential Threat”, The Guardian, 27 October 2014, https://​www.​theguardian.​com/​technology/​2014/​oct/​27/​elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-ai-biggest-existential-threat, accessed 1 June 2018. 123“Open Letter”, Future of Life Institute, https://​futureoflife.​org/​ai-open-letter/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 124Alex Hern, “Stephen Hawking: AI Will Be ‘Either Best or Worst Thing’ for Humanity”, The Guardian, 19 October 2016, https://​www.​theguardian.​com/​science/​2016/​oct/​19/​stephen-hawking-ai-best-or-worst-thing-for-humanity-cambridge, accessed 1 June 2018. 125See The Locomotives on Highways Act 1861, The Locomotive Act 1865 and the Highways and Locomotives (Amendment) Act 1878 (all UK legislation). 126See, for example, Steven E.

The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. Combining optimism and pessimism, Stephen Hawking said that AI will be: “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”.124 The most prominent futurists tend to concentrate on the long-term impact of potential superintelligence, which may still be decades away. By contrast, many legislators concentrate on the extreme short term, or even the past.


pages: 492 words: 149,259

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

In the absence of conclusive evidence for or against either the Big Bang or the Steady State, many scientists based their cosmological preference on gut instinct or on the personalities of those who championed the rival models. This was certainly the case for Dennis Sciama, who would become one of the foremost cosmologists of the twentieth century, and whose supervision would inspire Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and Martin Rees. Sciama himself had been inspired by Hoyle, Gold and Bondi, whom he called ‘an exciting influence for a younger person like myself.‘ Sciama also found himself drawn to various philosophical aspects of their theory: ‘The Steady State theory opens up the exciting possibility that the laws of physics may indeed determine the contents of the universe through the requirement that all features of the universe be self-propagating…The requirement of self-propagation is thus a powerful new principle with whose aid we see for the first time the possibility of answering the question why things are as they are without merely saying: it is because they were as they were.’

Although slightly embarrassed by the fervour that his words had inspired, Smoot nonetheless claimed to have no regrets: ‘If my comment got people interested in cosmology, then that’s good, that’s positive. Anyhow it’s done now. I can’t take it back.’ The mention of God, the striking images and the sheer scientific importance of the COBE breakthrough guaranteed that this was without doubt the biggest astronomy story of the decade. Even more fuel was added to the fire by Stephen Hawking, who said: ‘It’s the discovery of the century, if not of all time.’ At last, the challenge to prove the Big Bang model was over. Generations of physicists, astronomers and cosmologists—Einstein Friedmann, Lemaître, Hubble, Gamow, Alpher, Baade, Penzias, Wilson, the entire COBE team, and many others—had succeeded in addressing the ultimate question of creation.

‘Four Keys to Cosmology’, Scientific American (February 2004, pp. 30—63) A set of four excellent articles that give details of the latest measurements of the CMB radiation and their implications for cosmology:‘The Cosmic Symphony’, by Wayne Hu and Martin White, ‘Reading the Blueprints of Creation’ by Michael A. Strauss, ‘From Slowdown to Speedup’ by Adam G. Riess and Michael S. Turner, and ‘Out of the Darkness’ by Georgi Dvali. Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam, 2002) A richly illustrated book by the most famous cosmologist in the world. It won the 2002 Aventis prize for science books and is far more comprehensible than Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Guy Consolmagno, Brother Astronomer (Schaum, 2001) How religion and science can live together, by an astronomer at the Vatican Observatory.


pages: 1,132 words: 156,379

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

Davies (Eds.), Behavioural ecology: An evolutionary approach (3rd ed., pp. 203–233). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Hawkes, K. (1991). Showing off: Tests of an hypothesis about men’s foraging goals. Ethology and Sociobiology, 12, 29–54. Hawking, S. (2008). Stephen Hawking asks big questions about the universe. Ted. Retrieved March 3, 2018, from www.ted.com/talks/stephen_hawking_asks_big_questions_about_the_universe Hawks, J., Wang, E. T., Cochran, G. M., Harpending, H. C., & Moyzis, R. K. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 20753–20758. Henrich, J. (2004).

Before going any further, I should probably make clear that I don’t believe for a minute that extraterrestrials have actually visited Earth. It’s certainly possible that intelligent life has evolved elsewhere in the universe. But there’s no good evidence that any of it has traversed the interstellar darkness to spy on us, probe us, or otherwise interact with our civilization. (As Stephen Hawking once said, “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?”)2 Nonetheless, it is still valuable to ask: If an alien did drop in on us, how would it view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our social behavior, our religions, our languages, music, and science?


pages: 313 words: 94,490

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, Barry Marshall: ulcers, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, desegregation, Helicobacter pylori, Jeff Hawkins, low cost airline, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pepto Bismol, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer

The first kind is the expert—the kind of person whose wall is covered with framed credentials: Oliver Sachs for neuroscience, Alan Greenspan for economics, or Stephen Hawking for physics. Celebrities and other aspirational figures make up the second class of “authorities.” Why do we care that Michael Jordan likes McDonald’s? Certainly he is not a certified nutritionist or a world-class gourmet. We care because we want to be like Mike, and if Mike likes McDonald’s, so do we. If Oprah likes a book, it makes us more interested in that book. We trust the recommendations of people whom we want to be like. If you have access to the endorsement of Stephen Hawking or Michael Jordan—renowned experts or celebrities—skip this part of the chapter.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

That is to say, people use abstractions and simplified thought-patterns to streamline reality down to something they can get their minds around. Careful thinkers are especially reliant on mental models. As Karl Popper phrased it in The Open Universe, “Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification—the art of discerning what we may, with advantage, omit.” The problem, as physicist Stephen Hawking noted, is that “when such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth.”1 Usually, this is all for the good. Without shared mental models, societies would find it nigh on impossible to coordinate and cooperate.

Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3. PART II. EXTENDING THE GLOBALIZATION NARRATIVE 1. Karl Popper, The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982); Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design (London: Bantam Books, 2011). 4. A THREE-CASCADING-CONSTRAINTS VIEW OF GLOBALIZATION 1. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London: John Murray, 1817). 2. Andrew B. Bernard and Teresa C. Fort, “Factoryless Goods Producing Firm,” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 105, no. 5 (May 2015): 518–523. 3.


pages: 374 words: 89,725

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Though Quan had once been a prolific artist, he became afflicted with ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease) and gradually lost use of his hands and legs, making it increasingly difficult to work. At first, Ebeling thought about writing a check to Quan and his family, but then, over a conversation with his wife at dinner, this question surfaced: If Stephen Hawking can communicate through a machine, why don’t we have a way for an artist like Quan to draw again? That Why question started Ebeling on a journey that eventually led him to a What If moment: When Ebeling learned about laser-tagging projection technology—which uses a laser and a pointer to write graffiti on the sides of buildings—he wondered if there might be an affordable way to enable someone to communicate and even create art by manipulating a laser through eye movements.

Am I failing ‘differently’ each time? Do you find this question as interesting as I do? Want to join me in trying to answer it? (collaborative inquiry) How do you fit a large golf course on a small island? What if golf balls simply traveled too far? How might we create a symphony together? If Stephen Hawking can communicate through a machine, why don’t we have a way for a paralyzed artist like Quan to draw again? Knowing that laser technology can be used to create art, hands-free, what if we can figure out a way for Quan to control the laser with his eyes? If not now, then when? If not me, then who?


Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology by Adrienne Mayor

AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, deep learning, driverless car, Elon Musk, industrial robot, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, life extension, Menlo Park, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, popular electronics, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing test

Each of the gods endowed the artificial maiden with a human trait: beauty, charm, knowledge of the arts, and a deceitful nature. As the vengeful god’s AI agent, Pandora executed her mission to unseal a jar of disasters to plague humankind forever. She was presented as a wife to Epimetheus, a man known for his impulsive optimism. As we saw, Prometheus warned humankind that Pandora’s jar should never be opened. Are Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and other prescient thinkers the Promethean Titans of our era? They have warned scientists to halt or at least slow the reckless pursuit of AI, because they foresee that once it is set in motion, humans will be unable to control it. “Deep learning” algorithms allow AI computers to extract patterns from vast data, extrapolate to novel situations, and decide on actions with no human guidance.

Pharmaka “animates” the statues with a kind of “soul” or life but does not necessarily make them move. Hollow statues as vessels that are vivified by being filled with substances, Steiner 2001, 114–20. 19. Asimov’s laws, Kang 2011, 302. Future of Life Institute’s Beneficial AI Conference 2017; FLI’s board included Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek, Elon Musk, and Nick Bostrom. https://futurism.com/worlds-top-experts-have-created-a-law-of-robotics/. See also Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence: http://lcfi.ac.uk/. 20. Martinho-Truswell 2018. 21. Four-wheeled carts, Morris 1992, 10. A small, shallow bronze basin-cart on three wheels, an ancient example of pen, bonsai basin, was excavated in a sixth/fifth century BC archaeological site in China, indicating that the idea of a wheeled tripod was put into practice elsewhere in antiquity, Bagley et al. 1980, 265, 272, color plate 65.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

There would unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.2 “Thus,” Good declared, “the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that it is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”3 The message of the Asilomar experts was that keeping it under control is still an unsolvable problem. When a new supreme intelligence emerges, it is hard to see how an inferior human intelligence can govern it. As Musk put it, “It’s potentially more dangerous than nukes.”4 Stephen Hawking pronounced: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”5 Tegmark explains why a “breakout,” in which the machines take over the commanding heights of the society and economy, is almost inevitable. When Homo sapiens came along, after all, the Neanderthals had a hard time, and virtually all animals were subdued.

He describes the saga of organizing and funding the conference in an Epilogue, “The Tale of the FLI [Future of Life Institute] Team,” 316–35. 2. Tegmark, Life 3.0, 4. 3. Ibid., 4. 4. Musk on AI: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/13/elon-musk-at-sxsw-a-i-is-more-dangerous-than-nuclear-weapons.html. 5. Hawking on AI. It gave him a voice and he used it to warn against AI. https://qz.com/1231092/ai-gave-stephen-hawking-a-voice-and-he-used-it-to-warn-us-against-ai/ 6. Ray Kurzweil in speeches popularized the fable of the emperor of China and the inventor of chess. The emperor was so grateful for the invention that he offered the inventor anything he asked. The inventor said, “Just a grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard . . . and a doubling of the grains on each subsequent square of the 64.”


pages: 661 words: 169,298

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

I should like, however, to express my thanks for aid and criticism provided by William Alexander, Sherry Arden, Hans Bethe, Nancy Brackett, Ken Broede, Robert Brucato, Lisa Drew, Ann Druyan, David Falk, Andrew Fraknoi, Murray Gell-Mann, Owen Gingerich, J. Richard Gott III, Stephen Jay Gould, Alan Guth, Stephen Hawking, He Xiang Tao, Karen Hitzig, Larry Hughes, Res Jost, Kathy Lowry, Owen Laster, Irwin Lieb, Dennis Meredith, Arthur Miller, Bruce Murray, Lynda Obst, Heinz Pagels, Abraham Pais, Thomas Powers, Carl Sagan, Allan Sandage, David Schramm, Dennis Sciama, Frank Shu, Erica Spellman, Gustav Tammann, Jack Thibeau, Kip S.

The anthropic principle “explains” the miracle of the flat universe if we imagine the creation of many universes, only a fraction of which chance to have the values requisite for life to appear in them. But the explanation cannot be tested unless the creation of other universes can be established, something that may well be impossible by definition. In that sense, the anthropic principle is a dead-end street. The English physicist Stephen Hawking, whose work is said to have contributed to the formulation of the principle, nonetheless called it “a counsel of despair.”7 But where there is enigma there is also the promise of discovery: A paradox may signal an inadequacy in the way we are looking at a question, thereby suggesting a new and more fruitful way of approaching it.

Some theorists proposed, instead, a set of even stranger but at least equally promising hypotheses. Together, these ideas went by the name of “quantum genesis.” Their approach involved taking the random nature of quantum flux to heart and enshrining it as the ruling law of the extremely early universe. Here a pioneer was Stephen Hawking, holder of Newton’s old chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Described by colleagues as “the nearest thing we have to a living Einstein,” Hawking carried on a productive career in physics despite suffering from ALS, a disease that attacks the central nervous system.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Over the past quarter of a century, terms like complex adaptive systems, the science of complexity, emergent behavior, self-organization, resilience, and adaptive nonlinear dynamics have begun to pervade not just the scientific literature but also that of the business and corporate world as well as the popular media. To set the stage, I’d like to quote two distinguished thinkers, one a scientist, the other a lawyer. The first is the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking, who in an interview10 at the turn of the millennium was asked the following question: Some say that while the 20th century was the century of physics, we are now entering the century of biology. What do you think of this? To which he responded: I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

Amusingly, Kaplan and Meier each submitted similar but independent papers to the prestigious Journal of the American Statistical Association for publication, and a wise editor persuaded them to combine them into a single paper. This has since been cited in other scholarly papers more than 34,000 times, which is an extremely large number for an academic paper. For instance, Stephen Hawking’s most famous paper, “Particle Creation by Black Holes,” has been cited less than 5,000 times. Depending on the field, most papers are fortunate to receive even 25 citations. Several of my own that I thought were pretty damn good have been cited less than 10 times, which is pretty discouraging, although I am a coauthor of two of the most cited papers in ecology, each having more than 3,000 citations. 4.

A good source for detailed statistics on cities and urbanization are reports from the United Nations. See, for instance, their publication “World Urbanization Prospects,” https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf. 9. And, by the way, to several Nobel Prizes. 10. Stephen Hawking quoted in an interview, “Unified Theory Is Getting Closer, Hawking Predicts,” San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 23, 2000; www.mercurycenter.com/resources/search. 11. There are a number of popular books devoted to elucidating the new science of complexity. Among them are: M. Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); M.


pages: 574 words: 164,509

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

“An Existing, Ecologically-Successful Genus of Collectively Intelligent Artificial Creatures.” Paper presented at the 4th International Conference, ICCCI 2012, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, November 28–30. Kurzweil, Ray. 2001. “Response to Stephen Hawking.” Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence. September 5. Retrieved December 31, 2012. Available at http://www.kurzweilai.net/response-to-stephen-hawking. Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking. Laffont, Jean-Jacques, and Martimort, David. 2002. The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

An upward shift of the distribution of cognitive ability would have disproportionately large effects at the tails, especially increasing the number of highly gifted and reducing the number of people with retardation and learning disabilities. See also Bostrom and Ord (2006) and Sandberg and Savulescu (2011). 64. E.g. Warwick (2002). Stephen Hawking even suggested that taking this step might be necessary in order to keep up with advances in machine intelligence: “We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it” (reported in Walsh [2001]).


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

Rachel Cocker, “This Harvard scientist wants your DNA to wipe out inherited diseases—should you hand it over?,” Telegraph, March 16, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/harvard-scientist-wants-dna-wipe-inherited-diseases-should/. 17. Sarah Marsh, “Essays Reveal Stephen Hawking Predicted Race of ‘Superhumans’,” Guardian, October 14, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/14/stephen-hawking-predicted-new-race-of-superhumans-essays-reveal. 18. Rob Stein, “First U.S. Patients Treated With CRISPR As Human Gene-Editing Trials Get Underway,” NPR, April 16, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/04/16/712402435/first-u-s-patients-treated-with-crispr-as-gene-editing-human-trials-get-underway.

Harvard’s George Church, a veteran genome engineer, is keeping an open mind. “I just don’t think that blue eyes and [an extra] 15 IQ points is really a public health threat,” he told a British newspaper. “I don’t think it’s a threat to our morality.”16 In his final book, the great physicist Stephen Hawking predicted that we were heading toward an era of what he termed self-designed evolution. “We will be able to change and improve our DNA,” Hawking wrote. “We have now mapped DNA, which means we have read ‘the book of life,’ so we can start writing in corrections.”17 But for Hawking, the slippery slope didn’t stop at curing devastating diseases such as his own affliction, a slowly progressive form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

“AI Fight Club Could Help Save Us from a Future of Super-Smart Cyberattacks.” MIT Technology Review, July 20, 2017. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608288/ai-fight-club-could-help-save-us-from-afuture-of-supersmart-cyberattacks/. . “Response to Stephen Hawking.” Kurzweil Network, September 5, 2001. http://www.kurzweilai.net/response-to-stephen-hawking. . The Singularity Is Near. New York: Viking, 2005. Libicki, R. Cyberspace in Peace and War. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2016. Lin, J. Y. Demystifying the Chinese Economy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Marcus, M. P., et al.


pages: 439 words: 104,154

The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI by Edward Dolnick

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, complexity theory, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Leo Hollis, lone genius, music of the spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Aubrey, and diverse others.” The roll call of names highlights just how shocking these findings were. The microscope was so unfamiliar, and the prospect of a tiny, living, hitherto invisible world so astonishing, that even an eminent investigator like Hooke needed allies. It would be as if, in our day, Stephen Hawking turned a new sort of telescope to the heavens and saw UFOs flying in formation. Before he told the world, Hawking might coax other eminent figures to look for themselves. But Hooke and the rest of the Royal Society could not catch Leeuwenhoek. Endlessly patient, omnivorously curious, and absurdly sharp-eyed, he racked up discovery after discovery.25 Sooner or later, everything—pond water, blood, plaque from his teeth—found its way to his microscope slides.

., p. 468. 297 The first print run was tiny: Ackroyd, Newton, p. 89. 297 “It is doubtful,” wrote the historian: Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity, p. 140. 297 Perhaps half a dozen scientists: Hall, Philosophers at War, p. 52. 298 “A Book for 12 Wise Men”: “Lights All Askew in the Heavens,” New York Times, November 9, 1919, p. 17. See http://tinyurl.com/ygpam73. 298 “I’m trying to think who”: Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1998), p. 85. 298 But he rarely mentions calculus: I. Bernard Cohen discusses in detail Newton’s use of calculus in the “Introduction” to his translation of the Principia, pp. 122–27. 298 “Newton’s geometry seems to shriek”: Roche, “Newton’s Principia,” in Fauvel et al., eds., Let Newton Be!


pages: 377 words: 97,144

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

As the New York Times reported in 2010, “Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity.”4 These early adopters include two self-made billionaires: Peter Thiel, a financial backer of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Larry Page, who helped found Singularity University. Peter Thiel was one of the founders of PayPal, and after selling the site to eBay, he used some of his money to become the key early investor in Facebook. Larry Page cofounded Google. Thiel and Page obtained their riches by successfully betting on technology. Famed physicist Stephen Hawking is so concerned about a bad Singularity-like event that he warned that computers might become so intelligent that they could “take over the world.” Hawking also told the president of the United States that “unless we have a totalitarian world order, someone will design improved humans somewhere.”5 FIVE UNDISPUTED FACTS THAT SUPPORT THE LIKELIHOOD OF THE SINGULARITY 1.Rocks exist!

Forbes. http://blogs.forbes.com/quentinhardy/2010/08/11/bill-gates-on-science-education-the-future/. Hargittai, Istvan. 2006. The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Hawking, Stephen. 2000. “Science in the Next Millennium: Remarks by Stephen Hawking.” White House Millennium Council 2000. http://clinton4.nara.gov/Initiatives/Millennium/shawking.html. Hawks, John, Eric T. Wang, Gregory M. Cochran, Henry C. Harpending, and Robert K. Moyzls. 2007. “Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution.” PNAS 104 (52): 20753—58. Hazlett, Heather Cody, Michele Poe, Guido Gerig, Rachel Gimpel Smith, James Provenzale, Allison Ross, John Gilmore, and Joseph Piven. 2005.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Where other science fiction films, including the very popular Star Wars films, equaled or surpassed Star Trek in terms of glitzy settings and visual effects, Star Trek surpassed them all in its messages and its values. Several of its fictional scientific advances, moreover, have been praised by physicist Stephen Hawking, Apple Computer co-founder Stephen Wozniak, and Pulitzer Prize fiction winner Michael Chabon. As Hawking put it in a 1995 foreword to Lawrence Krauss’ The Physics of Star Trek, “There is a two-way trade between science fiction and fiction. Science fiction suggests ideas that scientists incorporate into their theories, but sometimes science turns up notions that are stranger than any science fiction.

We’re All Trekkies Now” and Leonard Mlodinow, “Vulcans Never, Ever Smile,” Newsweek cover stories on “To Boldly Go . . . How ‘Star Trek’ Taught Us to Dream Big,” 153 (May 4, 2009), 52–59. See Benjamin Nugent, American Nerd: The Story of My People (New York: Scribner, 2008) and Ben Zimmer, “The Word: Birth of the Nerd,” Ideas, Boston Sunday Globe, August 28, 2011, K1. Stephen Hawking, “Foreword,” in Lawrence M. Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek (New York: Basic Books, 1995), xii. Krauss, Physics of Star Trek, 83. See Gary Sledge, “Going Where No One Has Gone Before,” Discovery Channel Magazine, 3 (August 2008) and Krauss, Physics of Star Trek. Krauss has also written Beyond Star Trek: Physics From Alien Invaders to the End of Time (New York: Basic Books, 1997), which examines later science fiction movies for their own scientific accuracy and inaccuracy.


The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

“To experience we refer, as the only ground of all physical enquiry” (nineteenth-century man of science John Herschel). “Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery” (biologist Peter Medawar). “All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements” (physicist Stephen Hawking). Such words are an invocation and a celebration of modern science’s fourth great innovation, its fourth great departure from the empirical inquiry of old: a prohibition on any form of persuasion, however well founded, however objective, that is not based on empirical testing. To explain how the prohibition works and to get a sense of its novelty and peculiarity, we will visit Britain in the 1830s, where it is already at full operational capacity, shutting down any attempt to import philosophical or religious thinking into scientific argument.

THE DYSTOPIAN INDUCTION of young Atlantean scientists into some high church of empiricism couldn’t bear any resemblance to science education in the real world today—could it? It is in fact not so difficult to discern a moral quality in contemporary science’s empiricist strictures. Most striking to those in my own profession is the scientific high and mighty’s continual denunciation of philosophy. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s 2010 book The Grand Design opens by announcing: Philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. Apparently, Hawking himself had not kept up with modern developments in philosophy: there are philosophers who specialize in the prospects of string theory, the implications of cosmology, and the vicissitudes of quantum gravity, some working at Hawking’s own university at the time he wrote these words.


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

Over the months that followed, I started paying more attention to the discussion surrounding these questions. I started to notice the slew of articles, blog posts, and entire books by prominent people suddenly telling us we should start worrying, right now, about the perils of “superhuman” AI. In 2014, the physicist Stephen Hawking proclaimed, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”7 In the same year, the entrepreneur Elon Musk, founder of the Tesla and SpaceX companies, said that artificial intelligence is probably “our biggest existential threat” and that “with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”8 Microsoft’s cofounder Bill Gates concurred: “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”9 The philosopher Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence, on the potential dangers of machines becoming smarter than humans, became a surprise bestseller, despite its dry and ponderous style.

Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 678.   5.  Ibid., 676.   6.  Quoted in D. R. Hofstadter, “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye—and Doing My Best Not to Flinch,” in Creativity, Cognition, and Knowledge, ed. T. Dartnell (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 67–100.   7.  Quoted in R. Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind,” BBC News, Dec. 2, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540.   8.  M. McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With Artificial Intelligence, We Are Summoning the Demon,’” Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2014.   9.  Bill Gates, on Reddit, Jan. 28, 2015, www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2tzjp7/hi_reddit_im_bill_gates_and_im_back_for_my_third/?.


pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

Each involves scientists and engineers all over the world tackling potentially insoluble questions. What they will find (if anything), how long that will take, how much it will cost and how much value will be produced – all of this is uncertain, can’t be planned, predicted or forecast. CERN is a cathedral project. The phrase is Stephen Hawking’s and he used it to describe ‘humanity’s attempt to bridge heaven and earth’.1 Like the great medieval cathedrals of Europe, they are destined to last longer than a human lifetime, to adapt to changing tastes and technologies, to endure long into the future as symbols of faith and human imagination.

Yeats’, written in 1939 14 Firth, Joseph et al., ‘The “Online Brain”: How the Internet May Be Changing Our Cognition’, World Psychiatry, Vol. 18, Iss. 2, June 2019 7 BUILDING CATHEDRALS 1 ‘Our Attitude Towards Wealth Played a Crucial Role in Brexit. We Need a Rethink’, www.theguardian.com/­commentisfree/­2016/jul/­29/­stephen-hawking-brexit-wealth-resources 2 van Heijsbergen, Gijs, The Sagrada Família: Gaudí’s Heaven on Earth, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2018 3 ‘Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote “An Economy That Serves All Americans” ’, www.businessroundtable.org/­business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans, accessed 1 September 2019 4 ‘Helping Britain Prosper Plan’, www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/­Our-Group/­responsible-business/­prosper-plan, accessed 1 September 2019 8 SIMPLE, NOT EASY 1 Siilasmaa, Risto, Transforming Nokia: The Power of Paranoid Optimism to Lead Through Colossal Change, McGraw-Hill, 2019 2 Ibid. 3 ‘Nokia’s Risto Siilasmaa: Transformation Lessons from the Chairman’, www.cxotalk.com/­episode/­nokias-risto-siilasmaa-transformation-lessons-chairman, accessed 22 November 2018 4 The academic Veronica Hope-Hailey has demonstrated that companies going into a crisis with high levels of trust emerge stronger.


pages: 112 words: 34,520

Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to Happiness: THE FEELGOOD BOOK OF THE YEAR by Bill Bailey

coronavirus, COVID-19, happiness index / gross national happiness, lockdown, social distancing, Stephen Hawking

Read the classics, sure, but also an occasional lightweight airport pulp novel is a good palate cleanser for denser, richer fare. I was once stuck on a fourteen-hour layover in Indonesia on the island of Sulawesi, in the hot and crowded airport of Makassar. At the small bookshop, I browsed the carousel and found only two books printed in English: Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games. I decided to buy them both, and I ended up reading them as I sat for hours on a bucket-shaped plastic seat bolted to the floor. They were both entertaining in equal measure. Hawking for the grand, sweeping scope of his vision, the sometimes impenetrable language and the linear style, which makes it a tough read at the best of times; Clancy for the terse, peremptory dialogue, detailed descriptions of ordnance, and the occasional outbursts of violence with high-calibre weaponry.


pages: 332 words: 109,213

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague. Greene’s book explains to the nonexpert reader two essential themes of modern science. First it describes the historical path of observation and theory that led from Newton and Galileo in the seventeenth century to Einstein and Stephen Hawking in the twentieth. Then it shows us the style of thinking that led beyond Einstein and Hawking to the fashionable theories of today. The history and the style of thinking are authentic, whether or not the fashionable theories are here to stay. In his book The Elegant Universe, published in 1999, Greene gave us a more detailed and technical account of string theory, the theory to which his professional life as a physicist has been devoted.

The large number of negative observations are a result of the appalling condition the NASA shuttle program has gotten into. It is unfortunate, but true, and we would do a disservice if we tried to be less than frank about it. Why should we care about Feynman? What was so special about him? Why did he become a public icon, standing with Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking as the Holy Trinity of twentieth-century physics? The public has demonstrated remarkably good taste in choosing its icons. All three of them are genuinely great scientists, with flashes of true genius as well as solid accomplishments to their credit. But to become an icon, it is not enough to be a great scientist.


pages: 331 words: 104,366

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Artificial intelligence is on a path toward transforming every part of our lives in a way not seen since the creation of the Internet, perhaps even since we harnessed electricity. There are potential dangers with any powerful new technology and I won’t shy away from discussing them. Eminent individuals from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk have expressed their fear of AI as a potential existential threat to mankind. The experts are less prone to alarming statements, but they are quite worried too. If you program a machine, you know what it’s capable of. If the machine is programming itself, who knows what it might do?

But I remain confident that we will continue to enjoy chess, and to revere it, as long as we enjoy art, science, and competition. Thanks to the Internet’s matchless ability to spread myths and rumors, I’ve found myself bombarded with all sorts of misinformation about my own intellect. Spurious lists of “highest IQs in history” might find me between Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, both of whom have probably taken as many proper IQ tests as I have: zero. In 1987, the German news magazine Der Spiegel sent a small group of experts to a hotel in Baku to administer a battery of tests to measure my brainpower in different ways, some specially designed to test my memory and pattern recognition abilities.


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

When AlphaGo convincingly beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, it fueled a reaction that had been building over the last several years concerning the 24 Chapter 1 dangers that artificial intelligence might present to humans. Computer scientists signed pledges not to use AI for military purposes. Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates made public statements warning of the existential threat posed by AI. Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs set up a new company, OpenAI, with a one-billion-dollar nest egg and hired Ilya Sutskever, one of Geoffrey Hinton’s former students, to be its first director. Although OpenAI’s stated goal was to ensure that future AI discoveries would be publicly available for all to use, it had another, implicit and more important goal—to prevent private companies from doing evil.

Although the optimal solution would be a judicious balance between profit and fairness, the trade-off must be made explicit in the cost function, which requires that someone decide how to weight each goal. The ethical perspective of those in the humanities and social sciences should inform these trade-offs. But we must always keep in mind that choosing a cost function that seems fair may have unintended consequences.29 Calls to regulate the use of AI have come from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking as well as legislators and researchers. An open letter signed by 3,722 AI and robotics researchers in 2015 called for a ban on autonomous weapons: In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.30 This call for a ban was well meaning but could boomerang.


pages: 379 words: 108,129

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

I gave the airplane a little bit of left trim to avoid the town as I was reaching for the ejection panels.’ Rutan is like a coiled spring. He is now over seventy but is still flying high-performance aircraft and you get the impression he’ll be doing it in another seventy by sheer force of will alone. He swears prodigiously, almost spitting out the expletives. ‘Stephen Hawking is a prick!’ he announces. ‘You’re telling me I can’t go faster than the speed of light yet there’s a gravitational force in a black hole that’s strong enough to stop light and turn it around? Bullshit! Einstein’s theory of relativity? Shame on you! Bullshit! Never look at a limitation as something you ever comply with.

‘My optimistic statement of the day is not that information is power, but that information sharing is power,’ he says. ‘I think that’s repeatedly demonstrated in the course of human history – that the sharing of information makes us all more powerful – and that any society that suppresses information harms itself in large measure.’ As Stephen Hawking said, ‘With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.’ The Internet is another forum in which to talk. Like the telegraph, the telephone or the newspaper, it’s not perfect, but it adds to the number of ways we can converse to share information and ideas.


pages: 416 words: 112,268

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

(Another call from the Department of Coincidences?) Before Johnny Depp’s character dies, his mind is uploaded to a quantum supercomputer and quickly outruns human capabilities, threatening to take over the world. On April 19, 2014, a review of Transcendence, co-authored with physicists Max Tegmark, Frank Wilczek, and Stephen Hawking, appeared in the Huffington Post. It included the sentence from my Dulwich talk about the biggest event in human history. From then on, I would be publicly committed to the view that my own field of research posed a potential risk to my own species. How Did We Get Here? The roots of AI stretch far back into antiquity, but its “official” beginning was in 1956.

The message is the same in all three cases: “Don’t listen to them; we’re the experts.” Now, one can point out that this is really an ad hominem argument that attempts to refute the message by delegitimizing the messengers, but even if one takes it at face value, the argument doesn’t hold water. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are certainly very familiar with scientific and technological reasoning, and Musk and Gates in particular have supervised and invested in many AI research projects. And it would be even less plausible to argue that Alan Turing, I. J. Good, Norbert Wiener, and Marvin Minsky are unqualified to discuss AI.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Quoted in ibid: 260. 25. Paul De Grauwe, Leonardo Iania and Pablo Rovira Kaltwasser “How abnormal was the stock market in October 2008?” (11 November 2008) (www.eurointelligence.com/article.581+M5f21b8d26a3.0.html). 26. Stephen Hawking, during a 1994 debate with Roger Penrose at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge; in Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose (1996) The Nature of Space and Time, Princeton University Press, New Jersey: 26. 27. Fischer Black “Noise” (1986) Journal of Finance 41: 529–43. 28. John Maynard Keynes (2006) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Atlantic Books, New Delhi: 140. 29.

“Since our universe...exists a mere 20 billion years we, finance theorists, would have had to wait for another trillion universes before one such change could be observed.... A truly miraculous event.”25 But nobody wanted to accept that their models were incorrect. Confronted with quantum theory, Albert Einstein refused to believe that God played dice with the universe. But as Stephen Hawking remarked: “Not only does God play dice, but...he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”26 In his 1986 presidential address to the American Finance Association, Fischer Black distinguished between noise and information. In traditional communication, noise is the disruption in the passage of information through unintended addition to the signal between transmission and reception.


pages: 117 words: 36,809

Help by Simon Amstell

Nelson Mandela, Russell Brand, Stephen Hawking

A lot of actors can’t even look at themselves, they won’t watch the films. I came out of there thinking, My face should always be that big. to be free I got a hint that I didn’t actually want to be a transformative actor after reading an interview that Eddie Redmayne gave about his year-long preparation for playing Stephen Hawking. I was aware that most actors would be thinking, I’d love to have the opportunity to do something so challenging. And I thought, Who the hell can be bothered with this? I felt a bit better recently – I’d just finished writing a film and I thought, OK, we’re OK – what’s better than a film? And then my friend Russell Brand decided to start a revolution.


pages: 467 words: 114,570

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

Now if I mention that the Hindus long before al-Khwārizmi, and even Diophantus, were using rudimentary symbols to describe their equations; that al-Khwārizmi in his al-Jebr never solved problems beyond the quadratic (x2); that Diophantus tackled more complex problems; and that even the techniques al-Khwārizmi used, such as the method of ‘completing the square’ to solve a quadratic equation, were not new, then surely in the light of all this the argument championing his claim evaporates. I have heard it said that the reason for al-Khwārizmi’s reputation is simply because his was the first book that popularized the subject and set it in a form that could be followed by many people. But this is a feeble argument. One might just as well say that Stephen Hawking’s reputation as one of the greatest scientists of the modern era is due to his best-selling Brief History of Time, rather than his pioneering work in cosmology and the theories of black holes. So to settle the matter once and for all, I spoke to a mathematician friend of mine from the University of Warwick, Ian Stewart, who has a long-standing interest in the history of algebra.

As with all ancient medicine, and indeed most ancient science, this is mainly a mixture of superstition interwoven with science, but there is always much of practical use and importance.2 The Greeks of course excelled in the field of medicine – like almost everything else – and boast the two greatest physicians of antiquity: Hippocrates (fl. 420s BCE) and Galen (c. 130–216 CE), two men separated by a remarkable half a millennium. I say ‘remarkable’ here only because, while we often mention these two men in the same breath when talking about Greek medicine, this is somewhat equivalent in timescale to saying that the two giants of modern European cosmology are Copernicus and Stephen Hawking. Hippocrates’ legacy to medicine can be compared with that of Pythagoras to mathematics. Like the earlier mathematician, his life and achievements are somewhat shrouded in mystery. Both founded schools of thought that were to become more important than their founders. And like the Pythagorean mathematicians, Hippocratic physicians made an astonishing and lasting contribution to the field of medicine.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

If we made just one physical test molecule of each, together they would weigh more than the entire universe. 6 Cathedrals, Believers and Doubt Why Feats that Were Once Beyond Us Are Now Common, and Why We All Should Embrace the Flourishing that’s Under way (even though its consequences won’t always be what we expect) Collective efforts Individual geniuses hog the headlines, today and in the history books; we celebrate and lionize those persons who break through long-standing limits. But they are only the tip of the iceberg—the visible sliver of something massive and profound beneath the surface. Underlying the genius of Copernicus and da Vinci, Steve Jobs and Stephen Hawking is a larger story: the expansion of talents and capacities across a wide population of people. The last chapter showed the role collective genius plays in our present flourishing. Each of our brains is unique, and when conditions permit us to nurture, connect and focus many minds—like right now, through mass literacy and digital linking up—together we can co-create breakthroughs that complement and accelerate individual achievements.

Meanwhile, the search for intelligent alien life is gaining fresh momentum. In July 2015, Russian physicist-entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced Breakthrough Listen—a ten-year, $100 million pledge to boost the time spent scanning space for E.T. from dozens of hours per year to thousands, on the world’s best radio telescopes. As the physicist Stephen Hawking said at the launch event: “In an infinite universe, there must be other life. There is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer.”41 That answer will change how we see the stars—and ourselves—forever. But it will not raise productivity one bit. 2. The tangible impacts of genius defy simple measurement Of course, economic conditions matter, too.


pages: 396 words: 112,748

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, butterfly effect, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, experimental subject, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, power law, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, trade route

Progress has begun to seem slow, the naming of new particles futile, the body of theory cluttered. With the coming of chaos, younger scientists believed they were seeing the beginnings of a course change for all of physics. The field had been dominated long enough, they felt, by the glittering abstractions of high-energy particles and quantum mechanics. The cosmologist Stephen Hawking, occupant of Newton’s chair at Cambridge University, spoke for most of physics when he took stock of his science in a 1980 lecture titled “Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?” “We already know the physical laws that govern everything we experience in everyday life…. It is a tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform an experiment whose results we cannot predict.”

Saperstein, “Chaos—A Model for the Outbreak of War,” Nature 309 (1984), pp. 303–5. “FIFTEEN YEARS AGO” Shlesinger. JUST THREE THINGS Shlesinger. THIRD GREAT REVOLUTION Ford. “RELATIVITY ELIMINATED” Joseph Ford, “What Is Chaos, That We Should Be Mindful of It?” preprint, Georgia Institute of Technology, p. 12. THE COSMOLOGIST John Boslough, Stephen Hawking’s Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); see also Robert Shaw, The Dripping Faucet as a Model Chaotic System (Santa Cruz: Aerial, 1984), p. 1. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT THE SIMULATED WEATHER Lorenz, Malkus, Spiegel, Farmer. The essential Lorenz is a triptych of papers whose centerpiece is “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20 (1963), pp. 130–41; flanking this are “The Mechanics of Vacillation,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20 (1963), pp. 448–64, and “The Problem of Deducing the Climate from the Governing Equations,” Tellus 16 (1964), pp. 1–11.


pages: 382 words: 117,536

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019 by Stewart Lee

Airbnb, AltaVista, anti-communist, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Ford Model T, imposter syndrome, Jeremy Corbyn, New Journalism, off-the-grid, Overton Window, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, white flight

Christ, I can’t keep this forced nonsensical tone going any more, even to provoke the usual online Kremlin gremlin comments. I’m on tour, and it’s Tuesday in a Dundee hotel. I have to file this tomorrow from Perth by close of business, and the story unravels as quickly as I can rewrite it. Since I started scribbling, Rex Tillerson’s4 disappeared, the Sun says a Russian’s been strangled in New Malden5 and even Stephen Hawking’s and Ken Dodd’s deaths look like Putin might have had a hand in them. Did anyone toxicity-test the telescope and the tattyfilarious tickling stick? Thought not. The Brexit British are a joke now. Putin knows no one will stick their neck out for those wankers. I don’t know anything about Russia anyway.

This apparently showed that there was no need for a British border in Ireland, because of blah blah blah shit piss wank.2 It also proved that it can’t be that hot, as otherwise there wouldn’t be any snow, which is all made out of coldness, like in Frozen. Some misery-gongers and doom-dongers have even suggested that the late Professor Stephen Hawking’s 2017 warning that Earth had only one hundred more years of habitability now looks optimistic. But Hawking was a liar, because if the world really was in trouble like how he said it was, then why wouldn’t he of used his mind to invent a invention to mend it? It has proved very convenient for the biased hard Remainiac BBC that this supposed climate emergency emerged this week.


pages: 654 words: 204,260

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

The most challenging and nonintuitive of all the concepts in the general theory of relativity is the idea that time is part of space. Our instinct is to regard time as eternal, absolute, immutable—nothing can disturb its steady tick. In fact, according to Einstein, time is variable and ever changing. It even has shape. It is bound up—“inextricably interconnected,” in Stephen Hawking's expression—with the three dimensions of space in a curious dimension known as spacetime. Spacetime is usually explained by asking you to imagine something flat but pliant—a mattress, say, or a sheet of stretched rubber—on which is resting a heavy round object, such as an iron ball. The weight of the iron ball causes the material on which it is sitting to stretch and sag slightly.

It didn't take a huge amount of imagination to read backwards from this and realize that it must therefore have started from some central point. Far from being the stable, fixed, eternal void that everyone had always assumed, this was a universe that had a beginning. It might therefore also have an end. The wonder, as Stephen Hawking has noted, is that no one had hit on the idea of the expanding universe before. A static universe, as should have been obvious to Newton and every thinking astronomer since, would collapse in upon itself. There was also the problem that if stars had been burning indefinitely in a static universe they'd have made the whole intolerably hot—certainly much too hot for the likes of us.

If the particle degraded within an hour, it would trigger a mechanism that would break the vial and poison the cat. If not, the cat would live. But we could not know which was the case, so there was no choice, scientifically, but to regard the cat as 100 percent alive and 100 percent dead at the same time. This means, as Stephen Hawking has observed with a touch of understandable excitement, that one cannot “predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!” Because of its oddities, many physicists disliked quantum theory, or at least certain aspects of it, and none more so than Einstein.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Geraci is one of a number of authors who have painted Moravec as the intellectual cofounder, with Ray Kurzweil, of a techno-religious movement that argues that humanity will inevitably be subsumed as a species by the AIs and robots we are now creating. In 2014 this movement gained generous exposure as high-profile technological and scientific luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking issued tersely worded warnings about the potential threat that futuristic AI systems hold for the human species. Geraci’s argument is that there is a generation of computer technologists who, in looking forward to the consequences of their inventions, have not escaped Western society’s religious roots but rather recapitulated them.

At the end of 2014, the 2009 AI meeting at Asilomar was reprised when a new group of AI researchers, funded by one of the Skype founders, met in Puerto Rico to again consider how to make their field safe. Despite a new round of alarming statements about AI dangers from luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, the attendees wrote an open letter that notably fell short of the call to action that had been the result of the original 1975 Asilomar biotechnology meeting. Given that DeepMind had been acquired by Google, Legg’s public philosophizing is particularly significant. Today, Google is the clearest example of the potential consequences of AI and IA.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

It’s not that they wouldn’t welcome taking another step up the abstraction ladder; but they fear that no matter how high they climb on that ladder, they will always have to run up and down it more than they’d like—and the taller it becomes, the longer the trip. If you talk to programmers long enough about layers of abstraction, you’re almost certain to hear the phrase “turtles all the way down.” It is a reference to a popular—and apparently apocryphal or at least uncertainly sourced—anecdote that Stephen Hawking used to open his popular book A Brief History of Time: A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

“Somebody once asked me”: Charles Simonyi interview with David Berlind, March 22, 2005, at http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=1190. “All non-trivial abstractions” and “Abstractions do not really”: Joel Spolsky, “The Law of Leaky Abstractions,” November 11, 2002, online at http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions. htm and also in Joel on Software (Apress, 2004), p. 197. “A well-known scientist”: Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988), p. 1. Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (Random House, 1958). “If builders built houses”: Quotation widely attributed to Gerald Weinberg and confirmed in email to author. Description of Alan Kay’s presentation is from author’s observation at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech), April, 2003.


pages: 480 words: 119,407

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Women are hysterical (hystera is the Greek word for womb), crazy (if I had a pound for every time a man questioned my sanity in response to my saying anything vaguely feminist on Twitter I would be able to give up work for life), irrational and over emotional. The trope of the ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’ is so common it’s been satirised by Taylor Swift in her hit song ‘Blank Space’ and by Rachel Bloom in a whole Netflix series about a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Women are a ‘mystery’, explained renowned physicist Stephen Hawking,60 while Freud, who got rich and famous off his diagnoses of female hysteria, explained in a 1933 lecture that ‘Throughout history, people have knocked their heads against the riddle of femininity.’61 The intransigence of this feminine riddle has not gone unpunished. Women who had often done little more than manifest behaviours that were out of feminine bounds (such as having a libido) were incarcerated for years in asylums.

utm_source=quartzfb 54 Hoffman, Diane E. and Tarzian, Anita J. (2001), ‘The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain’, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 29, 13–27 55 http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/05/11/3654568/gender-roles-women-health/ 56 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/06/listen-to-women-uk-doctors-issued-with-first-guidance-on-endometriosis 57 https://www.endofound.org/endometriosis 58 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/28/endometriosis-hidden-suffering-millions-women 59 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/06/listen-to-women-uk-doctors-issued-with-first-guidance-on-endometriosis 60 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-says-women-are-the-most-intriguing-mystery-in-reddit-ama-a6687246.html 61 https://www.birdvilleschools.net/cms/lib/TX01000797/Centricity/Domain/1013/AP%20Psychology/Femininity.pdf 62 Showalter, Elaine (1985) The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980, London 1987 63 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/astounding-increase-inantidepressant-use-by-americans-201110203624 64 http://pb.rcpsych.org/content/pbrcpsych/early/2017/01/06/pb.bp.116.054270.full.pdf 65 https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine/article/10/2/289/article 66 Hoffman and Tarzian (2001) 67 Fillingim, R.


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

What will Earth be like when humans are no longer the most intelligent things on the planet? As science fiction writer and computer scientist Vernor Vinge wrote, “The best answer to the question, ‘Will computers ever be as smart as humans?’ is probably ‘Yes, but only briefly.’”5 As the excitement grows, so too does fear. The astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Dr. Stephen Hawking warns that AI is “likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.” Hawking is not alone in his concern about superintelligence. Icons of the tech revolution, including former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, echo his concern.

., “Robots, Techies, and Troops: Carter and Roper on 3rd Offset,” Breaking Defense, June 13, 2016, http://breakingdefense.com/2016/06/trust-robots-tech-industry-troops-carter-roper (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 21. Michael Sainato, “Steven Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates Warn About Artificial Intelligence,” The Observer (UK), Aug. 19, 2015, http://observer.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-elon-musk-and-bill-gates-warn-about-artificial-intelligence (accessed Oct. 8, 2016); and Elon Musk interview with MIT students at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Department Centennial Symposium, Oct. 2014, http://aeroastro.mit.edu/aeroastro100/centennial-symposium (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 22.


pages: 158 words: 46,353

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield by Robert H. Latiff

Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, CRISPR, cyber-physical system, Danny Hillis, defense in depth, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, failed state, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Internet of things, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Nicholas Carr, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, VTOL, Wall-E

So-called quantum computing, if fully realized, will make cryptography impossible, allowing a quantum computer to break any code. Imagine a world, especially a military one, in which nothing can be kept secret. The enormous size and complexity of software systems will make understanding them difficult and may lead to unsafe assumptions about their provenance. Such luminaries as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking have sounded alarm bells over the continuing push for artificial intelligence. While the media often raises fears of apocalyptic scenarios with intelligent robots taking over the world, their concerns also include the more prosaic. They, too, worry about artificial intelligence systems going beyond humans’ ability to control, but also include in their concerns such issues as how to determine system trustworthiness, and how to detect errors in algorithms.


pages: 251 words: 44,888

The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use by Bobbi Bly

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Columbine, Donald Trump, George Santayana, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Joan Didion, John Nash: game theory, Network effects, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, school vouchers, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, three-masted sailing ship

superlative (sue-PURR-lah-tiv), adjective The quality of something’s being the best in its class or quality. Our family’s show horses are SUPERLATIVE to the rest of the horses one can find in the county. supersede (sue-per-SEED), verb When one thing takes the place of another or renders the former obsolete. “The classical laws [of physics] were SUPERSEDED by quantum laws.” – Stephen Hawking, British theoretical physicist supplant (suh-PLANT), verb To take the place of. “If we would SUPPLANT the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and arguments so clear, that even their great authority fairly considered and weighted, cannot stand.” – Abraham Lincoln surfeit (SUR-fit), noun Having too much of a good thing, especially generous servings of food and drink.


pages: 165 words: 47,193

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

That’s what reinforces their skill and brings them happiness and success. At the same time, classroom-smart Caltech players would look pretty hapless on a basketball court with Bryant, Green, and James—and not merely because of the mismatch of athletic gifts. Those masters of basketball know their sport the way Stephen Hawking knows theoretical physics. If you’ve got what it takes to make a career in basketball—that is, if you’re good enough to rate a collegiate basketball scholarship—it makes sense to pursue it. The money isn’t bad. In 2014, the NBA signed a $24 billion, nine-year deal with ESPN/ABC along with TNT to televise its games.


pages: 434 words: 135,226

The Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy

Ada Lovelace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dava Sobel, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eratosthenes, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, German hyperinflation, global village, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, P = NP, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam, Wolfskehl Prize, Y2K

Riemann had now added the idea that even if the equation was the starting point, it was the geometry of the graph defined by the equation that really mattered. The problem is that the complete graph of a function fed with imaginary numbers is not something that is possible to draw. To illustrate his graph, Riemann needed to work in four dimensions. What do mathematicians mean by a fourth dimension? Those who have read cosmologists such as Stephen Hawking might well reply ‘time’. The truth is that we use dimensions to keep track of anything we might be interested in. In physics there are three dimensions for space and a fourth dimension for time. Economists who wish to investigate the relationship between interest rates, inflation, unemployment and the national debt can interpret the economy as a landscape in four dimensions.

It is like Hilbert’s attempt to prove that geometry is consistent by turning geometry into a theory of numbers. It only led to the question about the consistency of arithmetic. Gödel’s realisation is reminiscent of the description of the universe provided by a little old lady at the beginning of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. The lady stands up at the end of a popular astronomy lecture and declares, ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ Her reply to the lecturer’s question as to what the tortoise is sitting on would have brought a smile to Gödel’s face: ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever.


pages: 542 words: 132,010

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

Uncertainty is so central to the nature of science that it provides a handy way of distinguishing between a scientist talking as a scientist and a scientist who is using the prestige of his white lab coat to support political activism: Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist. In January 2007, a group of leading scientists, including astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, announced that the hands of the “Doomsday Clock”—a creation of the board of directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—would be moved forward. It was “five minutes to midnight,” they said. A key reason for this warning was the fact that, according to the statement of the board of directors, “global warming poses a dire threat to human civilization that is second only to nuclear weapons.”

Thanks to the prestige of the scientists involved, this statement garnered headlines around the world. But it was politics, not science. According to the IPCC, there are still enormous uncertainties about the consequences of climate change, and it is very possible those consequences will be nothing like the civilizational crisis claimed by Stephen Hawking and his colleagues. Even the most basic consequences—things that activists typically assume will happen—are uncertain. The report says it is “likely” that drought will increase—meaning greater than a 66 percent chance. How great that increase will be if it happens is far less clear, and more work needs to be done before the degree of certainty improves.


pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

Some of those from whom we expected the greatest skepticism—namely the top officials of several leading competition authorities—were actually the most realistic (as well as very helpful in our research) in pointing out how competition isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. And the person we might have expected to have the least to say about this particular subject, an applied mathematics professor of complex systems from South Africa’s University of Cape Town and coauthor of one of Stephen Hawking’s most influential papers, had perhaps the most profound observations. He helped us understand why the competitive metrics that we employ to measure our successes often leave us hungry and unsatisfied; he inspired in us the idea that the type of competition we encourage can be about more than the simple goal of winning, can reflect some higher purpose.

The inspiration came from the 2017 Tanner Lecture at Oxford University. The title of the talk was “On the Origin and Nature of Values.”2 Not a surprising topic coming from a philosopher or theologian. But from an applied mathematics professor of complex systems? To be specific: from George Ellis, coauthor with Stephen Hawking of one of the seminal works on general relativity theory, “The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time.” How could Professor Ellis enlighten us on morality? A professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, Ellis was an outspoken opponent of apartheid in the 1970s and ’80s, and has perhaps had more occasion to think about questions of morality than people who grew up in less troubled times and places.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Army over the next ten years for training to deliver situational awareness, information sharing, and decision-making. VR will also be used for treatment of psychiatric problems like PTSD. We will have educational environments where real and virtual teachers take students to travel in time and witness dinosaurs, visit the wonders of the world, listen to Stephen Hawking, and interact with Albert Einstein. Zoom video conferences could render far more lifelike meetings where people look like they do around a table in the flesh (but they may actually be wearing pajamas at home) and work together on a virtual whiteboard (that feels real). In healthcare, AR and MR could enable surgeons to perform surgery while VR can help medical students operate on virtual patients.

This debilitating concession may be unacceptable to any country that wants to win the arms race. It is also hard to enforce, and easy to find loopholes. A second proposed solution is a ban, which has been proposed by both the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and a letter signed by three thousand people, including Elon Musk, the late Stephen Hawking, and thousands of AI experts. Similar efforts have been undertaken in the past by biologists, chemists, and physicists against biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons respectively. A ban will not be easy, but previous bans against blinding lasers, chemical weapons, and biological weapons appear to have been effective.


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

By 2100 thrill seekers in the mould of (say) Felix Baumgartner (the Austrian skydiver who in 2012 broke the sound barrier in free fall from a high-altitude balloon) may have established ‘bases’ independent from the Earth—on Mars, or maybe on asteroids. Elon Musk (born in 1971) of SpaceX says he wants to die on Mars—but not on impact. But don’t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. And here I disagree strongly with Musk and with my late Cambridge colleague Stephen Hawking, who enthuse about rapid build-up of large-scale Martian communities. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. We’ve got to solve these problems here. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it’s a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. No place in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest.


pages: 158 words: 49,168

Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics by David Berlinski

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Douglas Hofstadter, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam

This has now changed, perhaps as the result of Douglas Hofstadter’s entertaining book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. And yet Gödel’s theorem has retained its esoteric aspect, with many mathematicians regarding it as marginal to their own working concerns. On the other hand, philosophers as well as physicists have attempted to appropriate Gödel’s theorem for their own ends. The physicist Stephen Hawking has recently declared that he for one has lost faith in the prospects of a single unified theory of everything; it has apparently been Gödel’s theorem, which he has been late in appreciating, that has persuaded him that any such system could not be complete if it were consistent. This is useful work, to be sure, but frustrating as well, since no application of the theorem has the force, or the clarity, or carries the conviction of the proof itself, so for every intended application, a counterapplication may be found.


pages: 198 words: 53,264

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

CHAPTER 4 John Meriwether Genius's Limits Investment success accrues not so much to the brilliant as to the disciplined. —William Bernstein Isaac Newton advanced science and thinking like few others ever have. With an IQ of 190, and the ability to calculate to the 55th decimal by hand, his intellect towered above Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. But powerful as his brain was, it was unable to save him from falling prey to our most basic human instincts, namely, greed and envy. In 1720, as shares of the South Sea Company began to rise and hysteria swept the streets of London, Newton found himself in a precarious situation. He bought and sold the stock, earning a 100% return on his investment.


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

The short sting of pessimism prevails while the powerful pull of optimism goes unnoticed. This underscores an important point made previously in this book: In investing you must identify the price of success—volatility and loss amid the long backdrop of growth—and be willing to pay it. In 2004 The New York Times interviewed Stephen Hawking, the scientist whose incurable motor-neuron disease left him paralyzed and unable to talk at age 21. Through his computer, Hawking told the interviewer how excited he was to sell books to lay people. “Are you always this cheerful?” the Times asked. “My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21.


pages: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

To balance the equation, those in the arts and humanities who tend to regard best sellers, graphic novels, and platinum albums as ipso facto artistic trash need to jettison that prejudice and learn to discern the considerable interplay between quality and quantity across the spectrum of the arts. I might add that scientists who disdain all attempts to explain science to the general public need to take on board much the same advice. I have on several occasions polled large audiences of scientists to confirm that they were inspired to become scientists by reading the works of Stephen Hawking, E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Hofstadter, Steven Pinker, and other excellent communicators of science. It is a shame, really, that the arts and humanities have not managed to generate many great counterpart explainer/celebrators from their ranks. Leonard Bernstein was one, and Sir Kenneth Clark was another, but that was half a century ago.

There is a long tradition of hype in AI, going back to the earliest days, and many of us have a well-developed habit of discounting the latest “revolutionary breakthrough” by, say, 70% or more, but when such high-tech mavens as Elon Musk and such world-class scientists as Sir Martin Rees and Stephen Hawking start ringing alarm bells about how AI could soon lead to a cataclysmic dissolution of human civilization in one way or another, it is time to rein in one’s habits and reexamine one’s suspicions. Having done so, my verdict is unchanged but more tentative than it used to be. I have always affirmed that “strong AI” is “possible in principle”—but I viewed it as a negligible practical possibility, because it would cost too much and not give us anything we really needed.


Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology) by Geoffrey C. Bowker

affirmative action, business process, classic study, corporate governance, Drosophila, government statistician, information retrieval, loose coupling, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Occam's razor, QWERTY keyboard, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, sexual politics, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, William of Occam

Throughout the history of classification systems over the past 200 years such specifications have progressively been winnowed away to make way for new kinds of context and new kinds of description now considered more interesting and relevant. What many sufferers of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis know as Lou Gehrig's disease is coded by the ICD - 1 0 as G 1 2 . 2 : motor neuron disease. (With the famous physicist Stephen Hawking now suffering from the disease, it may in future be more well known to the lay public as Hawking's disease, though baseball player Lou Gehrig first brought it to public awareness.) In the index to the lCD, the Parisian neurologist Charcot can lay claim to an arthropathy (tabetic), a cirrhosis, and a syndrome.

Such changes always span multiple disciplines, industries, and The !CD as Information Infrastructure 1 09 lines of work. Forms of automation, for instance, begin in one sphere and spread across lines of innovation and dependency. Scientists say that the natures of their disciplines are changing, in no small part due to these infrastructural shifts. Stephen Hawking in his inaugural lec­ ture as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge (a post once held by Newton) expressed a belief that by the turn of the century, computers would essentially perform work in theoretical physics. Humans would not be able to understand the mathematics, but they could aspire to inter­ preting its consequences (Hawking 1 980).


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

No book exists that is titled The Game of Life: Consciousness Explained, though Daniel Dennett did write a book called Consciousness Explained in which he posits that simple models like the Game of Life can provide insight into how consciousness might have evolved, an insight echoed by the physicist Stephen Hawking, who wrote, “It is possible to imagine that something like the Game of Life, with only a few basic laws, might produce highly complex features, perhaps even intelligence.”10 Figure 15.4: Patterns in the Game of Life Summary In this chapter, we studied two models of interacting cells arranged on a grid.

Therefore, the terminal velocity of the stuffed cheetah will equal 200 mph divided by 20, or 10 mph. 10 He was correct. For the record, Fresno is 30% larger than Iceland. Ball and LuPima 2012 describe how one can take lessons from the academy to the business world. 11 See Lo 2012. For a general argument see Myerson 1992. 12 Versions of this story can be found in the writings of William James, Stephen Hawking, and Antonin Scalia. Chapter 2: Why Model? 1 See Epstein 2008 for a finer categorization of reasons to model. Lave and March (1975) describe three categories of use: to explain empirical phenomena, to predict other, new phenomena, and to build and design systems. Implicitly, they also advocate using models to explore. 2 See Harte 1988.


pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

What we need are ways to judge just how speculative it really is, and a very useful starting point is to hear what those working in the field think about this risk. Some outspoken AI researchers, like Professor Oren Etzioni, have painted it as “very much a fringe argument,” saying that while luminaries like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates may be deeply concerned, the people actually working in AI are not.103 If true, this would provide good reason to be skeptical of the risk. But even a cursory look at what the leading figures in AI are saying shows it is not. For example, Stuart Russell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the most popular and widely respected textbook in AI, has strongly warned of the existential risk from AGI.

So even questions like these with potentially game-changing effects on how we think of the best options for humanity in the future seem to be best left to the Long Reflection. There may yet be ethical questions about our longterm future which demand even more urgency than existential security, so that they can’t be left until later. These would be important to find and should be explored concurrently with achieving existential security. 16 Stephen Hawking (Highfield, 2001): “I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.” Isaac Asimov (1979, p. 362): “And if we do that over the next century, we can spread into space and lose our vulnerabilities.


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Reddit, in its early days, and thanks to the interests of its early users—these young hackers along with their friends and mentors—was a narrow trove of technology news and liberal-leaning politics links. “Move to a new planet, says Hawking” linked to the BBC’s report on speculation from physicist Stephen Hawking that an asteroid or nuclear attack could wipe out civilization on Earth. “Top 10 Web Fads” was a link to a CNET report. “Students Combat Click Fraud” was a link to a blog post about the company Mikhail Gurevich and his two friends were building. Huffman took to telling friends, family, and press about this list of headlines they’d built by explaining that its posts were “the best of the web.”

That meant his hours of work, all his comments he considered thoughtful, could only be viewed by a select group, the moderators who’d already subscribed. The information that did get out immediately wasn’t good. A leaked chat log showed that Ohanian also engaged in a mostly tone-deaf exchange with the moderators of r/science, who’d hit walls in trying to solidify an AMA with Stephen Hawking, for which Taylor had been Reddit’s point person. Ohanian claimed he would dig into her mailbox to find the contact information and handle it but repeated over and over that moderators with questions should email a general message box. “You managed to burn through years of goodwill in an afternoon here,” one commented.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

This is the danger that we will be subjugated, intentionally or accidentally, by artificial intelligence (AI), a disaster sometimes called the Robopocalypse and commonly illustrated with stills from the Terminator movies. As with Y2K, some smart people take it seriously. Elon Musk, whose company makes artificially intelligent self-driving cars, called the technology “more dangerous than nukes.” Stephen Hawking, speaking through his artificially intelligent synthesizer, warned that it could “spell the end of the human race.”19 But among the smart people who aren’t losing sleep are most experts in artificial intelligence and most experts in human intelligence.20 The Robopocalypse is based on a muzzy conception of intelligence that owes more to the Great Chain of Being and a Nietzschean will to power than to a modern scientific understanding.21 In this conception, intelligence is an all-powerful, wish-granting potion that agents possess in different amounts.

Among the illustrious historic figures are Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Isidor Rabi, Leo Szilard, Joseph Rotblat, Harold Urey, C. P. Snow, Victor Weisskopf, Philip Morrison, Herman Feshbach, Henry Kendall, Theodore Taylor, and Carl Sagan. The movement continues among high-profile scientists today, including Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Lawrence Krauss, and Max Tegmark. Scientists have founded the major activist and watchdog organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, the Pugwash Conferences, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose cover shows the famous Doomsday Clock, now set at two and a half minutes to midnight.69 Physical scientists, unfortunately, often consider themselves experts in political psychology, and many seem to embrace the folk theory that the most effective way to mobilize public opinion is to whip people into a lather of fear and dread.

Cox, “NASA’s Ambitious Plan to Save Earth from a Supervolcano,” BBC Future, Aug. 17, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170817-nasas-ambitious-plan-to-save-earth-from-a-supervolcano. 18. Deutsch 2011, p. 207. 19. “More dangerous than nukes”: Tweeted in Aug. 2014, quoted in A. Elkus, “Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence,” Slate, Oct. 31, 2014. “End of the human race”: Quoted in R. Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind,” BBC News, Dec. 2, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540. 20. In a 2014 poll of the hundred most-cited AI researchers, just 8 percent feared that high-level AI posed the threat of “an existential catastrophe”: Müller & Bostrom 2014.


On Palestine by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Frank Barat

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, ghettoisation, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Stephen Hawking

Major companies have rethought their investments in Israel, trade unions have ceded their connections with Israeli counterparts as have various academic associations, including leading ones in the United States, and an impressive number of artists, authors, and world-renowned figures, including Stephen Hawking, have cancelled their trips to Israel. One component of the campaign—the academic boycott—is still contentious as is clearly evident in the conversation Frank and I had with Chomsky (Norman Finkelstein also publicly condemns this tactic). But it seems that it is accepted by many others as part of the new dictionary of activism and recently led to the creation in Israel of a “committee of boycott from within,” made up of Israeli Jewish academics with impressive membership numbers.


The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture From a Journey of 71 Million Miles by Astronaut Ron Garan, Muhammad Yunus

Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, book scanning, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, fake it until you make it, global village, Google Earth, Indoor air pollution, jimmy wales, low earth orbit, optical character recognition, overview effect, private spaceflight, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, Stephen Hawking, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber for X, web of trust

Social media enables people to build trust with their followers, to feel a real connection, and to build a level of trust even though they never meet face-to-face. Lily Cole is a successful model, actress, and social entrepre- 156â•…  Co n c l u sio n neur—╉though her real claim to fame, in my book, is that as an undergrad at Cambridge she interviewed Stephen Hawking for her thesis paper. Cole founded impossible.com in response to a question that perplexed her: Why do societies collapse in the wake of an economic crisis? “We still have the same amount of resources and skills as we had before the crisis,” she said, “but somehow we lost the means by which to get things done.


pages: 219 words: 61,334

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are? by Chris Rojek

Bob Geldof, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, deindustrialization, demand response, full employment, Gordon Gekko, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, sceptred isle, Stephen Hawking, the market place, urban planning, Winter of Discontent

Contrary to the tabloid, middle-brow view that there is a creeping tendency for British culture to be overwhelmed by film stars, sporting 97 BRITONS TODAY legends and pop idols, only 22 of the top 100 are living; and of those only twelve are from the fields of pop music, film and sport. For every Boy George, David Beckham, Bono or Cliff Richard, there is a Stephen Hawking, Tony Benn or J. K. Rowling. Three out of the top ten are engineers and natural scientists (Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton). Indeed, the poll suggests that the British value their scientists above their artists. The British are frequently dismissed as a philistine people, narrowly inured to respect practical knowledge, pragmatism and money-making activities, rather than abstract theory, philosophy and pure research.


pages: 261 words: 10,785

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

The only thing it needs to do is take our jobs. Nonetheless, I would be remiss if I didn’t include the fact that many extremely well regarded individuals with deep experience in science and technology have a far more ambitious view of what is ultimately possible. World-renowned cosmologist and author of the book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking, has said, “Computers are likely to overtake humans in intelligence at some point in the next hundred years.”35 Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, who received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999, is far more optimistic and predicts that machines will achieve true intelligence by 2029.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Intel is already reinventing the humble transistor by harnessing photons and quantum properties to increase processing power, and Kurzweil has set up the so-called Singularity University, backed by Google and NASA, to educate the next generation in making the Singularity possible. Even the British scientist Stephen Hawking believes it’s possible. Whether it happens suddenly, or over time, it appears that machines will become increasingly sophisticated and able to do much of the work of human beings. One commentator says: “As our machines become more like us, we will become more like them.” Perhaps machines will get smarter and more mobile while the human population becomes less intelligent and evermore housebound as a direct result.


Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

He will often have very deep knowledge in a certain area and method for gaining knowledge. The deeper motivation of the scientist is to gain foundational knowledge that is new to the world. This is also what he brings to any team: a firm grounding in reality. A good example of a famous scientist is Stephen Hawking, who investigated black holes that are of little direct practical relevance. The same can be said of Charles Darwin who also worked on problems that at the time had little practical relevance. This type is fairly rare but can be found in an R&D division of a product-oriented company. However, it has recently resurfaced in the form of the data scientist.


pages: 195 words: 60,471

Hello, Habits by Fumio Sasaki

behavioural economics, bounce rate, Jeff Bezos, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Richard Thaler, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Walter Mischel

It should also impact your sense of self-efficacy to know that if your relatives are skilled in that area, you should be able to do it as well. How are we supposed to measure that kind of impact with genetic testing? The answer to “genes or environment?” My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. —Stephen Hawking Is it genetics that makes a person, or is it the environment? A consensus is starting to emerge for this long-debated, complicated issue. Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb has answered that asking that question “is like saying that the area of the field depends more on its length than on its width.”


pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

So fruitful has this abandonment of anthropocentric theories been, and so important in the broader history of ideas, that anti-anthropocentrism has increasingly been elevated to the status of a universal principle, sometimes called the ‘Principle of Mediocrity’: there is nothing significant about humans (in the cosmic scheme of things). As the physicist Stephen Hawking put it, humans are ‘just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that’s in orbit round a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy’. The proviso ‘in the cosmic scheme of things’ is necessary because the chemical scum evidently does have a special significance according to values that it applies to itself, such as moral values.

Let me define that in a non-parochial way as the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be capable of causing. An example of a blindly pessimistic policy is that of trying to make our planet as unobtrusive as possible in the galaxy, for fear of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. Stephen Hawking recently advised this, in his television series Into the Universe. He argued, ‘If [extraterrestrials] ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.’ He warned that there might be nomadic, space-dwelling civilizations who would strip the Earth of its resources, or imperialist civilizations who would colonize it.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

They go on, thousands of them, voices crying out their fear and pain and helplessness, the voices of people whose lives have been crushed by the machine. From 2001’s HAL to The Terminator’s Skynet, it’s a science fiction trope: artificial intelligence run amok, created to serve human goals but now pursuing purposes that are inimical to its former masters. Recently, a collection of scientific and Silicon Valley luminaries, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, wrote an open letter recommending “expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do.” Groups such as the Future of Life Institute and OpenAI have been formed to study the existential risks of AI, and, as the OpenAI site puts it, “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

The fear is that an artificial general intelligence will develop its own goals and, because of its ability to learn on its own at superhuman speeds, will improve itself at a rate that soon leaves humans far behind. The dire prospect is that such a superhuman AI would have no use for humans, or at best might keep us in the way that we keep pets or domesticated animals. No one even knows what such an intelligence might look like, but people like Nick Bostrom, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk postulate that once it exists, it will rapidly outstrip humanity, with unpredictable consequences. Bostrom calls this hypothetical next step in strong AI “artificial superintelligence.” Deep learning pioneers Demis Hassabis and Yann LeCun are skeptical. They believe we’re still a long way from artificial general intelligence.


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

The combination of cloud computing, sensors, Big Data, machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), mixed reality, and robotics foreshadows socioeconomic change ripped from the pages of science fiction. There is a wide and growing spectrum of debate about the implications of this coming wave of intelligent technologies. On the one hand, Pixar’s film WALL-E paints a portrait of eternal relaxation for humans who rely on robots for the hard work. But on the other, scientists like Stephen Hawking warn of doom. The most compelling argument was to write for my colleagues—Microsoft’s employees—and for our millions of customers and partners. After all, on that cold February day in 2014 when Microsoft’s board of directors announced that I would become CEO, I put the company’s culture at the top of our agenda.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

Perhaps to protect his anonymity in the face of rising interest from the media and, more significantly, the authorities: to protect his own safety as the WikiLeaks panic began to erupt. There is also the possibility that he disappeared because he was ill. In 2009, Finney was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease – amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the same disease from which Stephen Hawking suffers. It is, for the most part, fatal and claims its victims within two to five years. ‘My symptoms were mild at first,’ he says, ‘and I continued to work, but fatigue and voice problems forced me to retire in early 2011. Since then the disease has continued its inexorable progression.’83 In March 2013 he said, ‘Today, I am essentially paralyzed.


pages: 218 words: 67,930

Me! Me! Me! by Daniel Ruiz Tizon

Bob Geldof, death of newspapers, gentrification, housing crisis, Live Aid, Stephen Hawking, young professional

Doctors dealing with life and death situations all day every day can end up writing their own prescriptions or touching up a patient when taking their pulse. “We all react differently to stressful situations and basically, it comes down to how well you learn to cope mentally with your lot. Imagine living as a paraplegic being fed through a straw. Fook that. Kill me now. Stephen Hawking writes a book, makes another million and pays a Thai bird to stretch his monkey for him. “The one thing I have learned is that you only get one go at life and spending it lying awake at night is not the best use of the limited time we all have on this planet. Promise yourself that 2011 will be the year it turns round for you, then do what you can to make it happen.


pages: 295 words: 66,824

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

On public television one sometimes sees a fantasia in which diverse historical figures are assembled for an imaginary conversation. Think, for example, of Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Benjamin Franklin discussing innovation. Sometimes a contemporary is added to the mix or simply paired with an illustrious precursor—maybe Karl Popper and David Hume, Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton, or Henry Kissinger and Machiavelli. Recently I tried to think with whom I might pair a present-day ace CEO, investor, or analyst. There are a number of books about the supposed relevance to contemporary business practices of Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient wise men, but the conversation I’d be most interested in would be one between a current wheeler-dealer and some accomplished hoaxer of the past, maybe Dennis Koslowski and P.


Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby by Sau Sheong Chang

Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, business process, butterfly effect, cloud computing, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, data science, Debian, duck typing, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Gini coefficient, income inequality, invisible hand, p-value, price stability, Ruby on Rails, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, text mining, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, We are the 99%, web application, wikimedia commons

I’ve also given you a quick introduction to Shoes, a simple but powerful UI toolkit for Ruby, and provided a couple of examples of how to program graphical user interface applications with it. What I’ve described in this chapter is a good start, and should provide you with enough foundation to explore the rest of the code in this book. Onward! * * * [2] From Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time (Bantam): A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish.


The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design by Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth

23andMe, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, Alvin Roth, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, cloud computing, computer vision, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, general-purpose programming language, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, ImageNet competition, Lyft, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, p-value, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, personalized medicine, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, short selling, sorting algorithm, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, telemarketer, Turing machine, two-sided market, Vilfredo Pareto

This is a simple example of optimization gone awry, but if you let your imagination run free, you can envision much more serious problems. If you extrapolate a little from the kinds of technology we have today to the kinds we might have in a hundred years, you might even arrive at the thought that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. And many high-profile people have. Stephen Hawking said that superintelligent AI “could spell the end of the human race.” Elon Musk views artificial intelligence as “our greatest existential threat.” And Google DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg has said that he thinks that artificial intelligence poses “the number one risk for this century.” In fact, when Google negotiated the purchase of DeepMind in 2014 for $400 million, one of the conditions of the sale was that Google would set up an AI ethics board.


pages: 247 words: 65,550

Eleanor Rigby: A Novel by Douglas Coupland

space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, uranium enrichment

I asked, quite frantically, what was wrong with him, but Jane instead questioned me as to how Jeremy and I had connected, and how he’d ended up at my place. Once she was satisfied that I was both genuine and concerned, she said, “MS.” “Oh.” “You don’t really know what it is, do you?” “Nobody ever does.” Leslie said, “Like that Stephen Hawking guy—the smartest guy on earth.” “No, that’s something else. This is multiple sclerosis.” I said, “It’s bad—isn’t it?” Jane nodded. “It is.” “How bad?” asked Leslie. Jane asked, “Can I have a cup of coffee?” I poured her one. At first none of us knew where to start, and then things became very medical very quickly.


Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

But residents of Indonesia, Egypt, and other nations with populations trending younger have a different perspective. In these places, government intervention may be the only way to ensure that the majority of future generations have any chance whatever of holding a job. There also are the perceived existential threats of singularity. Thinkers as sophisticated as Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have expressed concern that artificial intelligence, through an extended process of redesigning itself, could find humanity to be an imperfect pattern, and replace it. As cities become smarter, we are counting on the emergence of machines of astonishing algorithmic power. If they can “think” faster, and more efficiently, than humans, will they escape the conclusion that everything would run better, and all the threats to the network removed, if malfeasance and error were rooted out at the source?


The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

Princeton University Press, 2005. 5 Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity”, published in American Science, 1948. 6 I am aware that there are some difference of opinion about the exact numbers, but there is complete agreement about the relative magnitudes at each stage. 7 Based on the work of Dave Snowden, the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, an international research network, which he named the Cynefin Framework. 8 Based on a model by Glouberman & Zimmerman, 2002. Part Two Mindset Matters! Getting Beyond the Process 4 What Could be Wrong with “Being Right”? “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.” —Stephen Hawking On the evening of 20 December 1954, a small group had gathered together in Dorothy Martin's front room. They were waiting for their midnight rescue by spaceship, ahead of the imminent apocalypse that Martin, their eccentric but earnest leader, had been warned would take place by dawn the next day.


pages: 194 words: 63,798

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

The Milky Way’s rest frame is centered on its center of gravity, near Sagittarius A*. 3Acceleration is the change in an object’s velocity. In physics, “jerk” is the change in an object’s acceleration over time. As the Milky Way and Andromeda approach each other, their acceleration due to the mutual pull of gravity will increase, giving them a positive jerk. Chapter Thirteen: Death 1Hawking radiation, named after Stephen Hawking (with whom I was honored to share a birthday, along with Elvis and David Bowie), has never been observed. It is a theoretical way for black holes to dissipate their energy. Pairs of particles form on the boundary between a black hole and the vacuum of space, except the particles are just as likely to be on the outside of the black hole as the inside.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Because of these quasi-religious overtones, the singularity was frequently satirised as “rapture for nerds”, and many people felt awkward about using the term. The publication in 2014 of Nick Bostrom's seminal book “Superintelligence” was a watershed moment, causing influential people like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates to speak out about the enormous impact which AGI will have – for good or for ill. They introduced the idea of the singularity to a much wider audience, and made it harder for people to retain a blinkered optimism about the impact of AGI. For time-starved journalists, “good news is no news” and “if it bleeds it leads”, so the comments of Hawking and the others were widely mis-represented as pure doom-saying, and almost every article about AI carried a picture of the Terminator.


pages: 202 words: 72,857

The Wealth Dragon Way: The Why, the When and the How to Become Infinitely Wealthy by John Lee

8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, butterfly effect, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Donald Trump, financial independence, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Maslow's hierarchy, multilevel marketing, negative equity, passive income, payday loans, reality distortion field, self-driving car, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

They could never say “I'm scared to go for it” or “I'm too lazy to do what it takes”—they will simply come up with reasons such as “I'm too old now and the competition's too great” or “I don't have the time; I've got three young children and a demanding job.” In your universe: You have a whole list of excuses why you can't have what you want. In the parallel universe: You are stronger than your excuses. Look at how much Stephen Hawking does with nothing more than the ability to move a couple of facial muscles. Consider Nick Vujicic, a motivational speaker who was born without arms or legs. When I hear people moaning about their problems and complaining about their lives, I always reference Hawking and Vujicic. If these guys can achieve what they've achieved, then so can you!


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

This singular misstep is cited more often than the combined total of every other selection made throughout the magazine’s other twenty-six years, exacerbated by the fact that SPIN ultimately put Kurt Cobain on the cover ten times, seven of which came after he was dead. Because it feels so wrong in retrospect, the 1991 list is the only one that historically matters. 31 Also known as “kids who were mostly interested in other kids, or at least dogs and cats.” 32 Unless you count Stephen Hawking, who is technically a cosmologist. 33 As a species, the concept of “infinity” might be too much for us. We can define it and we can accept it—but I don’t know if it’s possible for humans to truly comprehend a universe (or a series of universes) where everything that could happen will happen.


Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

Over the next two years his private studies laid the foundations for much of his later work in subjects as diverse as calculus, optics and, of course, gravity. On returning to Cambridge in 1667 he was elected as a fellow, and became the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in October 1670 (a post recently held by Stephen Hawking and currently held by string theorist Michael Green – both of whom continue to work on the problem of the nature of gravity). Newton spent the next twenty years lecturing and working in a diverse range of scientific and pseudo-scientific endeavours, including alchemy and predictions of the date of the apocalypse.


pages: 291 words: 77,596

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

airport security, Albert Einstein, book scanning, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, information retrieval, invention of writing, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, language acquisition, lifelogging, Menlo Park, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, RFID, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Ted Nelson, telepresence, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application

File-and-folder hierarchies, even when stored digitally, suffer from the same basic limitation as libraries once did: Each book can exist only in one place, filed under one category. But an item might properly belong to several categories, or hundreds. A Brief History of Time is a physics book, but it’s also a book by Stephen Hawking, it was a best-seller, it talked about black holes, and it was published in 1988. You could easily come up with dozens of other attributes that would be perfectly legitimate criteria for tracking down A Brief History of Time and for sorting and grouping it with other books (and for that matter, for sorting and grouping it with other media of any kind: with lecture recordings, with songs, with articles, with pictures, with old news footage).


pages: 296 words: 78,631

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry

23andMe, 3D printing, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, chief data officer, computer vision, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, ransomware, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, systematic bias, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, trolley problem, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, William Langewiesche, you are the product

In 2005 a young man,58 conceived through a completely anonymous sperm donor, managed to track down and identify his birth father by sending off a saliva swab to be analysed and picking up on clues in his own DNA code.59 Then in 2013 a group of academics, in a particularly famous paper, demonstrated that millions of people could potentially be identified by their genes using nothing more than a home computer and a few clever internet searches.60 And there’s another reason why you might not want your DNA in any dataset. While there are laws in place to protect people from the worst kinds of genetic discrimination – so we’re not quite headed for a future where a Beethoven or a Stephen Hawking will be judged by their genetic predispositions rather than their talent – these rules don’t apply to life insurance. No one can make you take a DNA test if you don’t want to, but in the US, insurers can ask you if you’ve already taken a test that calculates your risk of developing a particular disease such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or breast cancer and deny you life insurance if the answer isn’t to their liking.


pages: 276 words: 71,950

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Cass Sunstein, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fixed income, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, Oklahoma City bombing, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Other artists have been subjected to similar threats.15 In 2002, Mona Baker, a professor of translation studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and the publisher of two scholarly journals—Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts—dismissed Gideon Toury, a professor at Tel Aviv University, from the advisory board of Translator. She also dismissed Miriam Shlesinger, a lecturer in translation studies at Bar-Ilan University, from the advisory board of Translation Studies Abstracts. Ironically, both Toury and Shlesinger oppose the Israeli government’s policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians.16 The late British physicist Stephen Hawking, who had previously visited Israel on several occasions, canceled a planned appearance at the President’s Conference in Israel in 2013 because he had “come under heavy pressure from activists who favor an academic boycott of Israel, both within Britain and outside it, [and] decided to listen to his Palestinian colleagues and stay home.”17 But BDS has not only targeted those visiting Israel.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

Medicare would assign the organisation a lump sum, a population and a set of goals (that’s the ‘accountable’ part, the organisation being accountable to its paymasters) and let the system work out the best way of achieving them. To some on the left, bringing accountable care to England is a privatisation Trojan horse with the spears sticking out, and not merely because of its US antecedents. Campaigners including the late Stephen Hawking and the health policy writer Allyson Pollock have argued that the stealthy introduction of accountable care, without public debate or legislation, is illegal. In the absence of explicit legislation, they argue, there’s nothing to stop accountable care organisations being or becoming commercial organisations, creating a new, controlling, for-profit layer between the government and the health service – a form of privatisation.


Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

However, as Marx displayed so brilliantly with his M-C-M (money-commodity-money) cycle, we can achieve analytic purchase by looking at C-M-C (which in our era, felicitously, may refer to computer-mediated communication). We can start perhaps by refining the terms of the cycle. Much of our “knowledge” today surpasseth human understanding. Stephen Hawking, in his inaugural lecture for the Lucasian Chair of Physics at Cambridge—once held by Newton, who had all those giants standing on his shoulders—pointed to the day when physicists would not understand the products of their own work.4 With the world of string theory upon us, it is clear that we cannot “think” in the necessary 10+1 dimensions and the complex geometries they entail.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

When he was interviewed for this book, he had just returned from a “Zero-G” flight with Hollywood director James Cameron and had recently met with X PRIZE Genomics cochair Dr. J. Craig Venter, of Human Genome Project fame. Whether he thinks about it or not, Diamandis is clearly leveraging his relationships to promote the healthy longevity meme. Supporters of the Genomics X PRIZE listed on the organization’s Web site include theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking and former CNN interview show host Larry King. Connected to the cause by Diamandis, both Hawking and King act as salespeople for the cause.28 For instance, Hawking says, “You may know that I am suffering from what is known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, which is thought to have a genetic component to its origin.


pages: 289 words: 22,394

Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Gödel, Escher, Bach, joint-stock company, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy

Animals will evolve, too, and it won’t be long before the Kentucky Derby is run in under a minute or our dogs get smart enough to housebreak themselves. We say to ourselves, “What a wonderful world!” Or maybe this notion of survival of the fittest is unappealing to you. Why should evolution steer us toward greater fertility and strength? Why should we evolve to a race of oversexed and overmuscled monsters? Why shouldn’t the Stephen Hawkings and Helen Kellers of the world have a chance—after all, we have the technology to overcome so many disabilities now. Perhaps evolution will favor greater and greater intellect, or even greater and greater contributions to the world! There’s no need to argue the two points, because evolution isn’t favoring either one of them.


pages: 312 words: 78,053

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Burning Man, call centre, Drosophila, Higgs boson, hive mind, index card, Large Hadron Collider, Live Aid, Magellanic Cloud, McJob, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

(Have you ever found a Romanian lab technician who couldn’t be bribed?) My personal rule is that I only get high when the weather sets a new record, and, BTW, my name isn’t CornDog. It’s Zack. And I’m not ADD, I’m just Zack. ADD is a face-saving term my parents slapped on me when they figured out I wasn’t Stephen Hawking. I hear people asking, Where is Zack’s mother? Is Zack a plucky orphan? No, Zack has an age-inappropriate future stepfather-in-the-making named Kyle who breeds genetically defective Jack Russell terriers with his mother in a shack in St. George, Utah. Charles, meanwhile, was relentless: “CornDog, what the hell were they thinking when they were divvying up your state?”


pages: 258 words: 79,503

The Genius Within: Unlocking Your Brain's Potential by David Adam

Albert Einstein, business intelligence, cognitive bias, CRISPR, Flynn Effect, Gregor Mendel, job automation, John Conway, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, SimCity, Skype, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray

My Mensa retest was at the same London university as the first, this time on a muggy Saturday morning the day after it was announced that Britain voted to leave the European Union. The rejection of expertise – and by extension, intelligence – had played a major role in the referendum. A string of smart people, from Stephen Hawking to the head of the Bank of England, had warned of the wide-ranging negative consequences. ‘I think people in this country have had enough of experts,’ responded Michael Gove, the newspaper-journalist-turned-politician who was chief among those pushing Britain to go it alone. As a member, I didn’t think that Mensa would have allowed me to take the test again.


The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

Anytime one comes across a highly successful entrepreneur—someone who has clearly systemized their business and who also, having the technical knowledge central to their business product, has therefore systemized their product—they might be expected to be more likely to have an autistic child or grandchild. Of course, hyper-systemizing in a parent or grandparent may not just manifest as financial wealth derived from business acumen: it could also show itself as scientific, academic, technical, literary, or musical expertise. Consider the remarkably successful physicist Stephen Hawking, who has an autistic grandchild.7 Or Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s most famous innovator and inventor, who has an autistic child.8 These anecdotes hint that hyper-systemizing grandparents and parents are more likely to have an autistic child or grandchild. But to move beyond anecdote to evidence, to test if this link is genetic and not due to chance, we need to look at rates of autism in a large population of hyper-systemizing parents.


Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

What seems to unite them both is certainty. Certainty about the nature of reality is something you won’t necessarily find in the hallways and cafeterias of scientific institutions. Scratch the average Nobel Prize winner and you’ll probably find someone fretting about the inexplicability of things. Stephen Hawking, for example, has publicly mused that science might soon have to abandon its quest for a ‘unified theory of everything’, such are the difficulties with the current picture. So what do Dawkins and his ilk know to justify their conviction and their arrogance? There’s no denying the achievements of science.


pages: 232 words: 72,483

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

To him, entwining humans and machines so thoroughly that they became indistinguishable was simply the next natural course of human evolution. * * * — ONE MIGHT FEEL that Kurzweil’s Bridge Four thinking was just a touch outside the views of the average Homo sapiens. Some, however, felt it was a very real threat. Elon Musk and, prior to his death in 2018, Stephen Hawking, had warned that superintelligent AIs could take over the planet—partly thanks to the work Musk’s friend Larry Page was supporting. “I have exposure to very cutting-edge AI,” Musk told attendees at the National Governors Association in July 2017, “and I think people should be really concerned about it.”


pages: 225 words: 78,025

The Life and Loves of a He Devil: A Memoir by Graham Norton

Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, Haight Ashbury, John Bercow, Russell Brand, Stephen Hawking, white picket fence

It stands to one side of a bridge near a bus stop where in my youth I spent many hours waiting to be transported to the sophisticated urban wonders of Cork. The day of the unveiling was grey and misty and I found myself like some dead-beat local politician making a speech from the back of a flat-bed truck holding a microphone that was designed to transform every speaker into Stephen Hawking. I spoke about roots and how the road out, which had been all I had been interested in, had also turned out to be the road home. The formal proceedings over, the bunting was taken down and the walkway returned to being a place where people stroll. Perhaps as they step in dog shit or see an old pram bobbing along in the river, they will think of me.


The Trauma Chronicles by Westaby, Stephen

Albert Einstein, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, James Dyson, lockdown, Nelson Mandela, social distancing, Stephen Hawking

Cold also ameliorates stress by boosting antioxidants in the blood, so when I walked back into that operating theatre I was in a better state to perform than the rest of the crew. It was Sunday. A new day. Another twenty-four hours on call. It Gets Difficult I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken computers. That is a fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark. Stephen Hawking A pulped liver protruding through a split diaphragm is a truly awesome sight. At least it is when you eventually see it after scooping blood clot out of the chest. Happily, the patient’s own clotting mechanism together with low blood pressure had stopped most of the bleeding, which is why he had survived to this point.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

His methodology can be challenged on many points, and seems to assume an active will to manipulate on the part of the search engine 53. author’s notes from a workshop on the ‘Ethics of Data in Civil Society’ organised by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Stanford University, September 2014 54. see, for example, the warning by Stephen Hawking: Rory Cellan-Jones, ‘Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind’, BBC News, 2 December 2014, http://perma.cc/VEC8-ZMXB 55. Eugene Volokh, ‘First Amendment Protection for Search Engine Search Results’, 20 April 2012, http://perma.cc/7YSD-9W6P. The title page states ‘This White Paper was commissioned by Google but the views within it should not necessarily be ascribed to Google’ 56.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

In their greatest works, mathematicians are revealing eternal truths that have some kind of prior ethereal existence.52* These ideas are ubiquitous in modern scientific cognition. Prominent cosmologist Max Tegmark asserts that “our universe is not just described by mathematics—it is mathematics…. We don't invent mathematical structures—we discover them, and invent only the notation for describing them.” And Stephen Hawking, possibly the greatest physicist of our time, concludes his bestseller A Brief History of Time by imagining the moment when the “theory of everything” is eventually discovered, with a reprisal of the Christian rationalist narrative: Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.

See also Livio, Is God a Mathematician?, 169–70; Jonas, Phenomenon of Life, 64; David Malone, “Perspectives: Are We Still Addicted to Certainty?,” New Scientist, no. 2615 (August 4, 2007). 53. Max Tegmark, “Mathematical Cosmos: Reality by Numbers,” New Scientist, no. 2621 (September 14, 2007); Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1998), 191. 54. For some rare, noteworthy examples of recognizing scientific cognition as a cultural assumption, see: Nathan Sivin, “Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China—or Did It?” Environmentalist 5, no. 1 (1985): 43; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 236–37. 55.


pages: 302 words: 83,116

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

Growing up in Seattle, he graduated from high school at fourteen and by the time he was twenty-three had earned, primarily at UCLA and Princeton, a bachelor’s degree (mathematics), two master’s degrees (geophysics/space physics and mathematical economics), and a Ph.D. (mathematical physics). He then went to Cambridge University to do quantum cosmology research with Stephen Hawking. Myhrvold recalls watching the British science-fiction TV show Dr. Who when he was young: “The Doctor introduces himself to someone, who says, ‘Doctor? Are you some kind of scientist?’ And he says, ‘Sir, I am every kind of scientist.’ And I was, like, Yes! Yes! That is what I want to be: every kind of scientist!”


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

It doesn’t matter what the reality is—Amazon will win, as it’s playing poker with ten times the chips. Amazon can muscle everyone else out of the game. The real hand-wringing is going to begin when people start asking if what’s good for Amazon is bad for society. It’s interesting to note that even while some scientists and tech tycoons (Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk) publicly worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and others (Pierre Omidyar, Reid Hoffman) have funded research on the subject, Jeff Bezos is implementing robotics as fast as he can at Amazon. The company increased the number of robots in its warehouses 50 percent in 2016.37 Peterson, Hayley.


pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

“The Role of Multiple Sources in the Formation of an Innovative Auxiliary Category in Light Warlpiri, a New Australian Mixed Language.” Language 89, no. 2 (2013): 328–53. Overbye, Dennis. “Reaching for the Stars, Across 4.37 Light-Years.” New York Times. April 12, 2016. Accessed April 16, 2016. <http://www.nytimes.2016/04/13/science/alpha-centauri-breakthrough-starshot-yuri-milner-stephen-hawking.html> Parker, Ian. “The Shape of Things to Come.” New Yorker. February 23, 2015. Accessed May 17, 2016. <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-come> Parks, Suzan-Lori. 365 Days/365 Plays. New York: Theater Communications Group, Inc., 2006. Partridge, Loren W., Gianluigi Colalucci, and Fabrizio Mancinelli.


pages: 288 words: 81,253

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

By recruiting past and future versions of yourself, you can become your own buddy. CHAPTER 6 Adventures in Mental Time Travel Let Marty McFly run into Marty McFly Thanks to the success of the three Back to the Future movies, our go-to source on the rules of time travel is more likely to be Doc Brown than Dr. Stephen Hawking. The first rule, emphasized by the trilogy and repeated by nearly every time-travel movie since, is “Whatever you do, don’t meet up with yourself!” Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) explains to Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) in Back to the Future: Part II (1989) that “the encounter could create a time paradox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe.


pages: 249 words: 80,762

Odd Girl Out: An Autistic Woman in a Neurotypical World by Laura James

autism spectrum disorder, cognitive dissonance, Kintsugi, Minecraft, neurotypical, pink-collar, Skype, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk

I have invited my children into the world and now I need to make it as welcoming and unjarring as possible. I ask how he feels and he says he is ‘excited for the boys, but sad’. It seems amazing to me that he can distil his feelings into these two simple words. Excited and sad. Mine feel like the sort of equation you see written on a huge blackboard by Stephen Hawking. I cannot begin to unpick or unravel the complex and myriad feelings darting through me. I know one of the feelings stings like a paper cut and another feels like a dull ache. I am sure one feels like panic and another like a heavy loss. I can’t tell Tim this. I find it almost impossible to talk about my feelings, even though each day I work at identifying them.


pages: 259 words: 85,514

The Knife's Edge by Stephen Westaby

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, dark triade / dark tetrad, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, presumed consent, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

I visualised her devastated parents sitting with a cold corpse in the mortuary, holding their daughter as I’d done in the ambulance, beseeching God to turn the clock back. There was no point trying to be logical about religion. I knew that high-ranking Oxford – and indeed Cambridge – academics scoffed at the deity concept. Both Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking had that gold-plated atheistic confidence in their own abilities, spurning outside help. I guess I was the same. But I would still sneak into the back of a college auditorium and listen to debates on the subject. Some disputed God’s existence because of all the evil and misery in the world, and while I could identify with that, I had contrary and privileged insight through the odd patient who actually claimed to have reached the Pearly Gates before we clawed them back.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In the face of that explosion, the need for algorithms has become mission critical. Consider for a moment that the last two years have seen nine times more data created than in the entire history of humanity. Then consider that the Computer Sciences Corporation believes that by 2020 we’ll have created a total 73.5 zettabytes of data—in Stephen Hawking’s phraseology, that’s seventy-three followed by twenty-one zeros. Remarkably, and often tragically, most companies today are still driven almost solely on the intuitive guesses of their leaders. They may use data to guide their thinking, but they are just as likely to fall prey to a long list of self-delusions—everything from a sunk-cost bias to a confirmation bias (see below for a list of cognitive biases).


pages: 266 words: 86,324

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, feminist movement, forensic accounting, Gary Kildall, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, index fund, Isaac Newton, law of one price, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pepto Bismol, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Jonathan Calvert and Will Iredale, “Publishers Toss Booker Winners into the Reject Pile,” London Sunday Times, January 1, 2006. 24. Peter Doskoch, “The Winning Edge,” Psychology Today, November/ December 2005, p. 44. 25. Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” p. 243. ALSO BY LEONARD MLODINOW A Briefer History of Time (with Stephen Hawking) Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace For children (with Matt Costello) The Last Dinosaur Titanic Cat Copyright © 2008 by Leonard Mlodinow All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.


pages: 269 words: 78,468

Kill Your Friends by John Niven

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Etonian, gentrification, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, nuclear winter, sensible shoes, Stephen Hawking

I’ve got another big album shaping up for next year too. You won’t believe it, but the press have gone mental for the Rage story we leaked out: the whole ‘a crippled man dislocated from his environment communicating through electronica’ bullshit I drummed up with the press office went down a storm. He’s being perceived as some kind of drum’n’bass Stephen Hawking. Front covers with NME, Muzik and Mixmag. They don’t know he finished the record months before he got quadra-spazzed. And what does it matter that the record’s an unlistenable pile of shite? He’s riding his steel wheelchair across a massive wave of PC goodwill. Are you going to be the journalist who sits down and tells this poor, drooling mess that his record sucks?


pages: 308 words: 84,713

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

,” Guardian, August 30, 2013, theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/aug/30/amanda-rosenberg-google-sergey-brin-girlfriend. 26.Weiser, “Computer for the 21st Century.” 27.Interview with Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, April 24, 2012, charlierose.com/watch/60065884. 28.David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 10. 29.Josh Constine, “Google Unites Gmail and G+ Chat into ‘Hangouts’ Cross-Platform Text and Group Video Messaging App,” TechCrunch, May 15, 2013, techcrunch.com/2013/05/15/google-hangouts-messaging-app/. 30.Larry Greenemeier, “Chipmaker Races to Save Stephen Hawking’s Speech as His Condition Deteriorates,” Scientific American, January 18, 2013, www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=intel-helps-hawking-communicate. 31.Nick Bilton, “Disruptions: Next Step for Technology Is Becoming the Background,” New York Times, July 1, 2012, bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/google’s-project-glass-lets-technology-slip-into-the-background/. 32.Bruno Latour, “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,” Theory, Culture and Society 19 (2002): 247–260.


pages: 249 words: 81,217

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age by Claudia Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Anton Chekhov, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, iterative process, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, overview effect, Stephen Hawking, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen

After seeing the Earth as a fragile ball in the void of space, nourished by a thin atmosphere, they developed an intense feeling of interconnection with other people, as well as the strong sense of a broader responsibility towards the planet. The astronauts were left with an overwhelming desire to cherish and protect it. Stephen Hawking said the message when you see the Earth from space is clear: ‘One planet. One human race.’ There are those who credit photographs from space with spearheading the environmental movement. Annahita believes that these views could have therapeutic value for the rest of us back on terra firma too.


The Gene Machine by Venki Ramakrishnan

CRISPR, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, ghettoisation, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

It does not have the arbitrary rule of three and has even occasionally been awarded to people who were left out of the Nobels because of that rule. It also ignores another Nobel criterion, which is that theories should have been experimentally verified to qualify. As a result, the Breakthrough Prize has gone to some brilliant physicists who did not qualify for the Nobel, such as Stephen Hawking (who died as I was writing this book). But just like other prizes, the Breakthrough Prize has almost never been awarded to someone who already has a Nobel (a few lucky recipients have really hit the jackpot by getting both in the same year). In any case, despite the large difference in the award amount, I doubt that most people would want to trade the Nobel for a Breakthrough Prize quite yet, although that could change.


pages: 268 words: 81,811

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

When Chuck Marvine, Harris’s boss, was promoted in spring 2014, he was relieved to hand responsibility for the case to a senior prosecutor in Kansas City named Jeff Le Riche. Le Riche had grown up obsessed with science and space in a small town in rural Missouri, devouring Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking books. At university, he majored in chemistry, but he came to the conclusion he wasn’t going to cut it as a scientist, so he went to law school instead. He worked in private practice for a while, then, after his kids were born, joined the CFTC so he could spend more time at home. When electronic trading exploded and markets grew bigger and more complex, his grounding in statistical analysis and data came to the fore and, like Harris, he found himself in demand.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

“Sometimes I joke that if the world gets destroyed by AI in the next ten years, the culprit is likely to be somebody I know,” he tells me without smiling. He is far from alone in fearing the taking over of the world by artificial intelligence, something that one leading American expert on AI describes as the “biggest event in human history.” The world’s richest man, Bill Gates; the world’s most famous physicist, Stephen Hawking; Silicon Valley’s most innovative entrepreneur, Elon Musk; and the Cambridge University cosmologist and author of Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century? Martin Rees (Lord Rees), all share Tallinn’s apocalyptic concerns. Not only do they all agree that this will be the biggest event in human history, they also fear it might be the last.


Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Etonian, Mercator projection, Stephen Hawking

At the top of a clean page in his logbook – following weeks of comment-free mathematical workings of his celestial sights – he wrote a title: ‘Philosophy’. He began by discussing Einstein, whose book, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, was one of the few he had brought along on his voyage to read. Einstein had written the book to explain his theory to a general audience; in its day it was as well-known and as widely unread as Stephen Hawking’s later explanation of the universe, A Brief History of Time. But for Crowhurst, reading it over and over in the isolation chamber of Teignmouth Electron’s lonely cabin, Einstein’s statements took on the truth and gravity of holy writ. One paragraph made a profound impact on him: That light requires the same time to traverse the path A to M as for the path B to M is in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own free will in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity.


pages: 286 words: 86,480

Meantime: The Brilliant 'Unputdownable Crime Novel' From Frankie Boyle by Frankie Boyle

Big Tech, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, printed gun, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, technoutopianism, Turing test, WikiLeaks

Tom and I are equal partners: we do a lot of our best work together. But we do a little role play because all our modelling suggests that people in big tech and investment are incredibly racist.’ ‘And not ableist?’ ‘Modelling suggests they’re actually slightly pro-disability. We think because of Stephen Hawking.’ ‘How did you get my number? I guess all my data’s online if you know how to get it.’ ‘No, we employ a resident private eye; it’s a kind of hipster thing, I suppose. Really, I called to tell you that we were impressed that all you were worried about was your friend; we were impressed that was all you asked of us.


pages: 259 words: 84,261

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

As AI transitions to AGI, artificial general intelligence, and beyond the confines of the programmable tasks the machine was invented to carry out, the concerns heighten. Irving Good, who was a consultant on the supercomputers in 2001: A Space Odyssey, warned of an intelligence explosion that prominent thinkers and tech marvels the likes of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have repeatedly warned against. Even before the very first of these machines was built, we have been concerned about their capacity to redesign themselves into further, more intelligent forms, and whether (or for how long) these ultra-intelligent machines would gladly be kept under our inferior control.


pages: 795 words: 215,529

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

Like many physicists he was wary of the term. Among scientists it became a kind of style violation, a faux pas suggesting greenhorn credulity, to use the word genius about a living colleague. Popular usage had cheapened the word. Almost anyone could be a genius for the duration of a magazine article. Briefly Stephen Hawking, a British cosmologist esteemed but not revered by his peers, developed a reputation among some nonscientists as Einstein’s heir to the mantle. For Hawking, who suffered from a progressively degenerative muscular disease, the image of genius was heightened by the drama of a formidable intelligence fighting to express itself within a withering body.

They looked to quantum uncertainty for an explanation of the many kinds of unpredictability that arise in the everyday, human-scale world: unpredictability in the weather, or indeterminacy in human behavior. Perhaps, some speculated, quantum unpredictability was the microscopic loophole through which free will and human consciousness entered the universe. Stephen Hawking, typically, wrote: “The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace’s dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic… . Quantum mechanics therefore introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science.” Feynman’s view was different.


pages: 329 words: 93,655

Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, deliberate practice, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, lifelogging, mental accounting, Neil Armstrong, patient HM, pattern recognition, Rubik’s Cube, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

I learned that there was someone in New York City with an IQ of 228, and a chess player in Hungary who once played fifty-two simultaneous blindfolded games. There was an Indian woman who could calculate the twenty-third root of a two-hundred-digit number in her head in fifty seconds, and someone else who could solve a fourdimensional Rubik’s cube, whatever that is. And of course there were plenty of more obvious Stephen Hawking types of candidates. Brains are notoriously trickier to quantify than brawn. In the course of my Googling, though, I did discover one intriguing candidate who was, if not the smartest person in the world, at least some kind of freakish genius. His name was Ben Pridmore, and he could memorize the precise order of 1,528 random digits in an hour and—to impress those of us with a more humanist bent—any poem handed to him.


pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

This has so little to do with what we typically think of as power that the influence that comes from prestige is often accorded to people who in other contexts would be thought of as utterly powerless. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an increasingly frail-looking octogenarian, is in a position to wield more influence with a single utterance from the Supreme Court bench than most people ever will in a lifetime. Stephen Hawking is physically incapable of doing anything at all without assistance, yet when he speaks or writes—always with the aid of a machine—the world listens and reads. His power comes from the mind that resides in a broken body. For all of our species’ more primitive tendencies, this submission to wisdom speaks very well of us.


pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Born within just a few years of each other—Henry in 1797 and Faraday in 1791—the two scientists saw their most productive years as well as their research overlap. That Henry did not attain the same historic stature as Faraday does not diminish his contributions. Few scientists appear in history books alongside inventors such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, or Samuel F. B. Morse. Names like Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Isaac Newton are among the handful of exceptions that attest to the rule. One reason is the basic fact that to a large degree, the most enduring legacy of science is knowledge. Scientific experimentation, abstractions, and discovery of underlying principles hold little popular appeal today compared to products that transform everyday life or create vast fortunes.


pages: 264 words: 90,379

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, fake news, haute couture, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, young professional

—David Brooks, New York Times Book Review “Compelling....Blink satisfies and gratifies....It features the fascinating case studies, skilled interweavings of psychological experiments and explanations, and unexpected connections among disparate phenomena that are Gladwell’s impressive trademark.” —Howard Gardner, Washington Post “What Stephen Hawking did for theoretical physics Malcolm Gladwell is doing for social science....Gladwell uses a series of fascinating examples to support his views, weaving scientific data into page-turning prose.” —Jill Spitznass, Portland Tribune “A provocative and enlightening read....It is a pleasure to travel through this land of rapid cognition with a guide as curious and insightful as Gladwell.”


pages: 286 words: 90,530

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Stephen Jay Gould’s first book of essays Ever Since Darwin was the phenomenon of 1977, but though Dawkins and Gould continued to sell mouth-watering quantities of successive books in the 1980s it was not until 1987 that popular science again saw a best-seller on the scale of The Selfish Gene. That year saw James Gleick’s Chaos rocket into the best-seller lists, followed the next year by the even more extraordinary success of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Gleick and Hawking, like Dawkins, were telling the public about new scientific ideas in ways that engaged them as equals. But they were not simultaneously trying to argue with rival professionals. They were in the explaining, not the exploring, tradition. Not until Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct in 1994 did a true successor to The Selfish Gene appear: an argumentative book aimed at persuading professional scientists as well as enlightening laymen and written in unputdownable prose.


Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child by Alissa Quart

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, Flynn Effect, haute couture, helicopter parent, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Two Sigma, War on Poverty

Austin has founded a corporation and wants to buy land and get into property. He has paid a lawyer with his own money to set it up properly.” Earnest is also impressed that his son Austin reads what Earnest calls “adult materials”: a college chemistry textbook. At nine and a half, Austin read A Brief History of Time,” the Stephen Hawking astrophysics best seller. The one thing Earnest keeps wondering about, though, is what he considers the “elitism” of the gifted community. Beth and Earnest argue this point constantly and, at least when I was there, playfully. Sometimes their children join in, Earnest taking the part of the “mainstream,” as he puts it—those who would have been passed over by the giftedness crowd, whether they deserved to be or not, simply because they didn’t speak the right code or answer test questions properly.


pages: 347 words: 90,234

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between by Lee Gutkind

airport security, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Columbine, David Sedaris, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mark Zuckerberg, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, out of africa, personalized medicine, publish or perish, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, working poor, Year of Magical Thinking

The word “creative” has been criticized in this context because some people have maintained that being creative means that you pretend or exaggerate or make up facts and embellish details. This is completely incorrect. It is possible to be honest and straightforward and brilliant and creative at the same time. Albert Einstein, Jacques Cousteau, Stephen Hawking, and Abraham Lincoln are just a few of the brilliant leaders and thinkers who wrote truthful, accurate, and factual material—and were among the most imaginative and creative writers of their time and ours. The word “creative” in creative nonfiction has to do with how the writer conceives ideas, summarizes situations, defines personalities, describes places—and shapes and presents information.


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

In the next chapter, I’ll stop assuming and address arguments that say income inequality isn’t something we really need fret about. 10 Why It Matters Clarence the Angel: We don’t use money in heaven. George Bailey: Comes in pretty handy down here, bub. —Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE says that all men are created equal, but we know that isn’t true. George Clooney was created better-looking than me. Stephen Hawking was born smarter, Evander Holyfield stronger, Jon Stewart funnier, and Warren Buffett savvier at playing the market. All these people have parlayed their exceptional gifts into very high incomes—much higher than mine. Is that so odd? Odder would be if Buffett or Clooney were forced to live on my income, adequate though it might be to a petit bourgeois journalist.


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

Later that week the UK Telegraph reported on the session with the headline: ‘Sociopathic robots could overrun the human race within a generation’, accompanied by a particularly scary picture of aggressive, demonic-looking fighting robots. The headline didn’t capture the nature of the debate but it did capture the growing unease people feel about the impact that AI and robotics will have on their work and concerns about what will be left. When even Professor Stephen Hawking worries that the rise of AI represents a fundamental threat to the future of humanity, it is perhaps not surprising that such widespread concerns exist. 9See for instance Ford, M., The Rise of the Robots (Basic Books, 2015); Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A., The Second Machine Age (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014). 10Ford, The Rise of the Robots. 11Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age. 12Autor, D.


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

Revealing the Macintosh to the world for the first time in 1984, in a presentation that was to become the archetype for the company’s hype-heavy launches, Apple boss Steve Jobs shocked the audience as he showed that the computer could speak, its rudimentary voice-emulation software ringing around the hall, sounding for all the world like a disembodied, time-travelling Stephen Hawking. For those who had seen Engelbart’s demo, though, Jobs’ entire presentational schtick looked more than a little familiar. In the early 1990s, Stuart Brand set up The Well, a legendary bulletin board that was an early gathering point for intellectuals and cyberutopians. The Well, or Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, was a virtual community that hosted conversations between some of the web’s earliest champions including John Gilmore.


pages: 349 words: 27,507

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, British Empire, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Thorstein Veblen, time dilation

For further topics in astrophysics there are an abundance of fine texts. The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity, by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin (New York: Free Press, 1999), is especially good, covering the story from the earliest moments to a very, very distant future. Stephen Hawking’s collection Black Holes and Baby Universes (New York: Bantam, 1993) is entertaining and wryly thoughtful; while for the reader who relishes popular science books on the universe but finds they’re beginning to blur, I’d strongly suggest stepping back and 317 guide to further reading working through a crisp introductory text such as The Dynamic Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy, by Theodore P.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

With superintelligent computers that understand the universe on levels that humans cannot even conceive of, these machines become not just tools for lightening the burdens of humanity; they approach the omniscience and omnipotence of a god. Not everyone, however, is so optimistic. Elon Musk has called superintelligence “the biggest risk we face as a civilization,” comparing the creation of it to “summoning the demon.” Intellectual celebrities such as the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking have joined Musk in the dystopian camp, many of them inspired by the work of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2014 book Superintelligence captured the imagination of many futurists. For the most part, members of the dystopian camp aren’t worried about the AI takeover as imagined in films like the Terminator series, with human-like robots “turning evil” and hunting down people in a power-hungry conquest of humanity.


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

The technological revolution has improved our lives in some ways, but it has also given rise to worry, despair, and even dread. Technological change is leading to all kinds of effects, and some may not be quite what we bargained for. Some of our greatest entrepreneurs and scientific minds see even darker clouds on the horizon. People like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have cautioned that technology could become so sophisticated that it decides to pursue its own goals rather than the goals of the humans who created it. The reason to worry has been articulated by Vernor Vinge in a 1993 essay entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity,” as well as by Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, and most recently by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, who works at the University of Oxford.


Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

* * * plane window towers telephone lines green squares lights baggage The New World dream The extended arm The caravan traversing a million miles of prairie Cross the uncrossable Make that journey and build the road along the way. You succeeded at memory-creation beyond all wildest dreams. Two Weeks Later TUESDAY, JANUARY 17,1995 Hanshin Expressway Stephen Hawking walking through quiet rooms pointing out things you've never seen before. Mitsukoshi department store, Kobe, Japan, at a 45-degree angle, its contents smashed against walls Western Washington State, minus Seattle's metro region, is assigned a new area code, 360, effective January 15, 1995 R U Japanese?


pages: 386 words: 92,778

"Live From Cape Canaveral": Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today by Jay Barbree

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, dark matter, Gene Kranz, gravity well, invisible hand, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, white flight

These plans give NASA a head start on getting to Mars. A lunar outpost just three days away from Earth will give space travelers needed practice of “living off the land” before starting out on the long road to the fourth planet from the sun. Arguably the best mind on our planet today, famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking believes “Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as global warming, a genetically-engineered virus or other dangers.” Hawking says flatly, “I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space.” The good news is NASA has a devoted and strong man at its helm in Dr.


pages: 317 words: 89,825

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, FedEx blackjack story, global village, hiring and firing, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, late fees, loose coupling, loss aversion, out of africa, performance metric, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, super pumped, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, work culture

We live in a walled garden of excellence, where everyone is a high performer. You go into these meetings and it’s like the talent and brain power in the room could generate the office electricity. People are challenging one another, building up arguments, and each of them is practically smarter than Stephen Hawking. That’s why we get so much done at such incredible speed here. It’s because of the crazy high talent density. The high talent density at Netflix is the engine that drives Netflix success. Reed learned this simple but critical strategy after the layoffs in 2001. More complicated was figuring out what steps to take in order to attract and retain that top talent.


Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

TV previews in newspapers that admit they haven’t seen the show, people dismissing films they haven’t watched, getting angry about jokes they haven’t heard. We all do it and, in a way, not showing us bin Laden’s body is the perfect way to make us believe he is dead. We feel far greater certainty about things we haven’t seen than we do about risking opinions on things we have. Stephen Hawking said in an interview that there is no heaven. I can see why he wouldn’t believe in God – after all, it looks like God doesn’t believe in him. Harold Camping, that California-based preacher who predicted Armageddon, was so embarrassed when the world didn’t end that he must have just wanted the ground to open and swallow everyone else up.


pages: 778 words: 227,196

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

No astronomer yet had the least idea of the enormous distances involved, so huge that they cannot be given in terms of conventional ‘length’ measurement at all, but either in terms of the distance covered by a moving pulse of light in one year (‘light years’), or else as a purely mathematical expression based on parallax and now given inelegantly as ‘parsecs’. One parsec is 3.6 light years, but this does not seem to help much. One interesting psychological side-effect of this is that the universe became less and less easy to imagine visually. Stephen Hawking has remarked, in A Brief History of Time (1988), that he always found it a positive hindrance to attempt to visualise cosmological values. ♣ As with road directions, a diagram is a much better way to explain parallax than a written sentence. But it is interesting to try. Parallax is basically a trigonometrical calculation applied to the heavens.

♣ The romantic tale of Paulina Jermyn, the beautiful seventeen-year-old botanist who fell in love at the 1832 British Association meeting at Oxford, perhaps deserves wider currency. See David Wooster, Paula Trevelyan (1879). ♣ This benign and eccentric image defined the Victorian ideal of the scientist, just as the later faintly surreal images of Albert Einstein-riding a bicycle or putting his tongue out-defined the twentieth-century one. The current images of Stephen Hawking, brilliant but paralysed and gargoyle-like in his wheelchair, perhaps better express the uncertainty of contemporary attitudes to science. The wheelchair itself takes us back to Dr Strangelove, but also eventually returns us to Sir Joseph Banks, rolling briskly into one of his scientific breakfasts in Soho Square, keen to meet his next young protégé and launch a new project ‘for the Benefit of all mankind’.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

—William James, 18952 It’s March 2011 and I have just arrived at a three-day retreat about geoengineering in the Buckinghamshire countryside, about an hour and a half northwest of London. The meeting has been convened by the Royal Society, Britain’s legendary academy of science, which has counted among its fellows Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking. In recent years, the society has become the most prominent scientific organization to argue that, given the lack of progress on emission reduction, the time has come for governments to prepare a technological Plan B. In a report published in 2009, it called upon the British government to devote significant resources to researching which geoengineering methods might prove most effective.

People have got to be able to get on together, because it’s going to be quite confined.” Oh and one more person on the list: “It may be a one-way trip. . . . So maybe I’ll wait till the last 10 years of my life, and then maybe go, if my wife will let me,” Branson said. In explaining his rationale, the Virgin head has invoked physicist Stephen Hawking, who “thinks it’s absolutely essential for mankind to colonize other planets because one day, something dreadful might happen to the Earth. And it would be very sad to see years of evolution going to waste.”61 So said the man whose airlines have a carbon footprint the size of Honduras’ and who is pinning his hopes for planetary salvation not on emissions cuts, but on a carbon-sucking machine that hasn’t been invented yet.62 Perhaps this is mere coincidence, but it does seem noteworthy that so many key figures in the geoengineering scene share a strong interest in a planetary exodus.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

These are huge questions, as enormous and perhaps as difficult to answer as whether or not computers will ever be capable of genuinely experiencing emotions. As it happens, the two questions may be intimately interlinked. Recently a number of notable luminaries, scientists, and entrepreneurs have expressed their concerns about the potential for runaway AI and superintelligent machines. Physicist Stephen Hawking, engineer and inventor Elon Musk, and philosopher Nick Bostrom have all issued stern warnings of what may happen as we move ever closer to computers that are able to think and reason as well as or perhaps even better than human beings. At the same time, several computer scientists, psychologists, and other researchers have stated that the many challenges we face in developing thinking machines shows we have little to be concerned about.


pages: 328 words: 96,141

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

He envisioned daily operations, where seven space tourists would climb aboard the craft, travel to the edge of space, and enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness and incredible views before coming back down for a landing. Never one to miss an opportunity for the limelight, Branson began drumming up business for Virgin Galactic with gusto. He sold tickets to space for $250,000 a seat, which he bought for himself and his family and then hawked to celebrities like Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie, and Stephen Hawking. The first flights were expected to begin in 2007 from a new “spaceport” in New Mexico. Given the relative speed with which the Ansari X Prize had been won—less than eight years of work between announcement and achievement—commercializing the design seemed like a fairly trivial engineering problem.


pages: 327 words: 102,322

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

On the other side is a nano-technology department where experiments with microscopic particles are influencing the creation of muscular new materials and instruments for, among other things, construction and medical applications. When Lazaridis welcomed hundreds of academics, politicians, and scientists, including theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, to the opening of the center in September 2012 he made the same kind of bold promises that RIM’s competitors once doubted at their peril. “I believe that the work that will be done here will help transform the way we work, live, and play,” he said, “[by] decoding the rules and laws of the universe.”1 Away from the limelight, Lazaridis’s private interests are equally ambitious.


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

They then made sure to emphasize that suicide is strictly against the rules. We were all in this thing together, and we all just had to wait this embodiment thing out. Meanwhile, on the playground, I was contemptuous of the seemingly Neanderthal boys who shot hoops and grunted their way through recess—meanwhile, my friends and I talked about MS-DOS and Stephen Hawking. I tended to view the need to eat as an annoyance—I’d put food in my mouth to hush my demanding stomach the way a parent gives a needy infant a pacifier. Eating was annoying; it got in the way of life. Peeing was annoying, showering was annoying, brushing the crud off my teeth every morning and night was annoying, sleeping a third of my life away was annoying.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

THE FIFTH LIE OF RENTIER CAPITALISM ‘Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.’ Stephen Hawking, October 2015 The platform capitalism taking shape is not a sharing economy. Nor is it wholly parasitic; it offers new and more efficient services, and it is commodifying spheres that were outside the market economy. But it is transformative, contrary to the contention of defenders of the old labour system, such as Lawrence Mishel, president of the Democrat-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC, who has dismissed its impact as ‘trivial’.39 It is transformative directly, by generating tasking labour for millions, and indirectly, through its impact on traditional suppliers of invaded services.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

As you will see, finance is a complex, self-organizing system—like an ant colony, for instance—where the interactions of individual players can produce large-scale effects. Yet individuals have no control over the whole system, as they themselves are subject to its laws and systemic forces. Recognizing the power of the elite few is all the more important as there is no one controlling force, no real checks and balances. Physicist Stephen Hawking termed the twenty-first century the “century of complexity.” Indeed, technologization, financialization, and globalization have created a level of complexity that we have a hard time keeping up with. To tackle contemporary problems, traditional linear, cause-and-effect thinking is of limited effectiveness.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Our news culture being what it is, we tend to hear the opinions of celebrity thinkers and innovators the most, and particularly when they are willing to thrill us with a good scare. Thus the statement by Elon Musk that AI represents “our biggest existential threat” was probably the most repeated quote of 2014. Right on its heels was Stephen Hawking’s warning that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” and Bill Gates’s musing that “I don’t understand why some people are not concerned.” Many thinkers, however, are less famous and less frightened (and therefore give up any headline-grabbing impact or opinion).


pages: 356 words: 102,224

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, linked data, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, power law, profit motive, remunicipalization, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, time dilation

In the 1950s, it was suggested by the astronomer Harlow Shapley of Harvard that brown dwarfs—he called them "Lilliputian stars"— 182 were inhabited. He pictured their surfaces as warm as a June day in Cambridge, with lots of area. They would be stars that humans could survive on and explore. Third: The physicists B. J. Carr and Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University have shown that fluctuations in the density of matter in the earliest stages of the Universe could have generated a wide variety of small black holes. Primordial black holes—if they exist—must decay by emitting radiation to space, a consequence of the laws of quantum mechanics.


pages: 313 words: 101,403

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, fixed income, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, hiring and firing, implied volatility, interest rate derivative, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, law of one price, linked data, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, proprietary trading, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stochastic volatility, technology bubble, the new new thing, transaction costs, volatility smile, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Working, hiking, talking physics, listening to music at the Aspen Music Center, playing volleyball to let off steam-this was what academic physics was supposed to be like, but my enjoyment was tempered by my year without publication, which made me feel that regular summers in Aspen and the partaking of its pleasures would not be part of my destiny. June passed quickly, and in July I traveled to Cape Town. My mother, like Stephen Hawking, had been ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for several years, and each year I went home to see her. But while Hawking miraculously seemed to stabilize, my mother went steadily downhill in the 1970s, growing worse each year, first losing the ability to move her arms, her hands, and then her legs, until she finally began to have difficulty holding her head up or swallowing.


pages: 338 words: 100,477

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds by Kevin Dutton

availability heuristic, Bernie Madoff, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, credit crunch, different worldview, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, equity premium, fundamental attribution error, haute couture, job satisfaction, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Milgram experiment, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile

‘We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders’ – Maya Angelou, address to Centenary College of Louisiana, March 1990. Tall Order I arrived at London City airport to a scene of total chaos. A complete systems failure meant that everyone was being checked in manually and the usually expansive concourse was packed with queues so geometrically double-jointed even Stephen Hawking would have marvelled. No one, at this airport, was going anywhere fast. In fact some weren’t going anywhere at all. A guy a little bit ahead of me was spoiling for a fight. He’d already sounded off a couple of times on his phone, and had finally had enough. He marched – or rather, minced – right up to the front of the queue, threw down his Prada cabin bag, and demanded that he be checked in immediately.


Interplanetary Robots by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Elon Musk, independent contractor, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, X Prize

One such design would contain an electronic core about the size of a potato chip and would travel on a beam of light. The Breakthrough Starshot initiative was started in 2016 to develop tiny interstellar probes. Prominent members of the effort include professor of astronomy Avi Loeb, of Harvard University, and Pete Worden, the former director of NASA's Ames Research Center. The late Stephen Hawking was involved before his death, and the project is being funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who committed $100 million to his broader Breakthrough Initiatives, which also includes a SETI component.1 In a nutshell, Breakthrough Starshot proposes that we first utilize “nanoprobes” for interstellar flight, tiny spacecraft that, when combined in swarms, can send back a large amount of data that can be put together to give us a good picture of what conditions prevail in neighboring star systems.


pages: 385 words: 98,015

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, Turing machine

This led him to posit and prove theorems that showed that, if general relativity is right, the gravitational field becomes infinitely strong within the core of black holes.5 Once that happens, the theory breaks down, because its equations stop working to predict the future. Such places, where time may start or stop, are called singularities. Afterward, working with Stephen Hawking, he extended his method to the expanding universe and proved that general relativity predicts that time began a finite time into our past, when the whole universe began its expansion in a state of infinite density.6 But his inventions exceed even these transformative contributions to general relativity.


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

In addition, for TTS systems to be comprehensible by human beings, it turns out that much of what had been understood (by some) as paralinguistic features, like prosody, intonation, stops and starts, interruptions, nonlexical pauses, and so forth, must all be managed in some fashion, or otherwise produce speech that sounds extremely mechanical and even robotic. Most such systems still today sound highly mechanical, as in the widely used Macintosh speech synthesizer or the systems used by individuals like Stephen Hawking, who are unable to speak. Even these systems, it turns out, do not produce speech in a similar manner to human beings, but rather must use a pre-assembled collection of The Cultural Logic of Computation p 96 parts in a combinatorial fashion, often using actual recorded samples of human speech for a wide range of applications that directly generated computer speech can’t manage.


pages: 357 words: 98,853

Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome by Nessa Carey

dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kickstarter, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neuron disease or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a devastating disorder. Neurons in the brain and spinal cord which control muscle movement die off progressively. Sufferers become increasingly wasted and paralysed, unable to talk, swallow or breathe properly.24 The cosmologist Stephen Hawking suffers from ALS, although his case is rather atypical. He was first diagnosed at the age of 21, whereas most people with ALS develop their first symptoms in middle age. Professor Hawking has survived for over 50 years with the condition, but sadly most patients die within five years of diagnosis, although this period may be increasing with better medical intervention.


pages: 241 words: 90,538

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945 by Pat Thane

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gender pay gap, longitudinal study, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, old-boy network, pensions crisis, Russell Brand, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

CONCLUSION The number of physically disabled people with high public profiles is probably greater now than at any time since 1945, and may have contributed to public acceptability of anti-discrimination legislation. The success of David Blunkett in overcoming blindness to attain high office in government may have provided a role model for other disabled people and helped to reduce popular stereotyping of the limited capacities of disabled people. The Cambridge University physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking, who has Lou Gehrigs Disease and is confined to a wheelchair and speaks through a computer, may be a less equivocal role model of very high achievement by a severely disabled person. In the sporting world, increased television coverage and publicity involving the Paralympics has made a household name and role model of Dame Tanni Grey Thompson.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Finally, a decade later, my request made it all the way up to the FAA administrator, Marion Blakey, an amazing woman who had the right answer: “Of course you should be able to do this—let’s figure out how.” #1: IF ANYTHING CAN GO WRONG, FIX IT! (TO HELL WITH MURPHY!) Back in 2007, I decided that the world’s foremost expert on gravity deserved the opportunity to experience zero gravity, so I offered professor Stephen Hawking a parabolic flight. He accepted, and we issued a press release. This is when our friends at the FAA—whose unofficial motto is clearly “we’re not happy until you’re not happy”—reminded us that our operating license permitted us to fly only “able-bodied” passengers, and Hawking, being totally paralyzed and wheelchair bound, did not qualify.


pages: 316 words: 101,950

With the End in Mind by Kathryn Mannix

fail fast, job satisfaction, pattern recognition, Stephen Hawking

Instead, he was in a position of having to choose whether to continue with ventilation, with a smaller machine that could be used at home and carried about with him, or to discontinue and die because his respiratory muscles would not be strong enough to support him. One of those people who has a long MND history, I thought, thinking of Stephen Hawking. I hope he has a supportive family … In fact, Max had been widowed in his forties and he lived alone in an elegant, isolated Georgian farmhouse. He volunteered for the Citizens Advice Bureau and his local refugee centre. His passion for justice remained undimmed, and this guided him through the crisis at diagnosis.


The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alvin Roth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business cycle, compensation consultant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Garrett Hardin, global village, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Network effects, positional goods, prisoner's dilemma, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Shoshana Zuboff, Stephen Hawking, stock buybacks, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy

So do Boris Becker, P. D. James, Carl Sagan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hakeem Olajuwon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gerard Depardieu, Oksana Baiul, Alan Dershowitz, Alberto Tomba, John Madden, Mel Gibson, Mick Jagger, George Soros, Kip Keino, Jacques Derrida, Sonia Braga, Diane Sawyer, Gary Kasparov, Giorgio Armani, Stephen Hawking, Michael Jordan, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Elle Macpherson, John Cleese, Katerina Witt, Peter H0eg, George Will, Kirniko Date, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John Grisham. T he markets in which these people and others like them work are very dif­ ferent from the ones economists normally study. We call them winner­ take-all markets because the value of what gets produced in them often depends on the efforts of only a small number of top perform­ ers, who are paid accordingly.


pages: 322 words: 99,918

A Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, death from overwork, do what you love, Downton Abbey, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, microdosing, obamacare, offshore financial centre, remote working, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, work culture

being the mildly manic philosophy I’d adhered to for the past 33 years. My loosely thought-out plan was this: to integrate as far as possible in an attempt to understand Denmark and what made its inhabitants so happy. Up to this point, my typical New Year’s Resolutions consisted of ‘do more yoga’, ‘read Stephen Hawking’ and ‘lose half a stone’. But this year, there was to be just one: ‘live Danishly’. Yes, I even invented a new Nordic adverb for the project. Over the next twelve months, I would investigate all aspects of living Danishly. I would consult experts in their fields and beg, bully or bribe them to share their secrets of the famed Danish contentment, and demonstrate how Danes do things differently.


pages: 296 words: 94,948

Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny by Nile Rodgers

Bob Geldof, delayed gratification, East Village, gentrification, haute couture, Live Aid, nuclear winter, Pepsi Challenge, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Stephen Hawking, the High Line, urban renewal

James taught me how to panhandle in ten languages (even sign language) and generally became my mentor. He was very attractive to women, even though he wasn’t especially good-looking (or at least I couldn’t see it). In fact, he was filthy, a street person’s street person. But he was smart, and I don’t mean your run-of-the-mill average-genius smart. I’m talking next-level, Stephen Hawking smart, but in the hippie’s way: He didn’t believe in adding specialization and discipline to his genius. He just knew a lot about everything. I’ve rubbed up against many people with exceptional abilities in my life, but James may be one of the five brightest people I’ve met. He had Svengali-like power over me, but I was cool with it.


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

Hedgehogs returned, and predictably, the media fanned the flames of fresh futurism. But something strange is happening in AI lately. I noticed it in more skeptical talk in 2018, and in 2019 it’s unmistakable. The foxes are returning. Many mythologists (with a few notable exceptions) are also non-­ experts, like Elon Musk, or the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, or even Bill Gates. Still, they helped create much of the media ballyhoo about AI—­mostly, deep learning ballyhoo—­which peaked a few years ago (circa 2015, give or take a year). Now, though, it’s increasingly common to hear talk of limitations again—­for instance, from Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and founder of robotics com­ pany Robust.AI, who coauthored with computer scientist Ernest Davis the 2019 Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can 76 T he S implified W orld Trust.9 Marcus and Davis make a compelling argument that the field is yet again overhyped, and that deep learning has its limits; some fundamental advance ­w ill be required to achieve generally intelligent AI.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

The bulk of Superintelligence isn’t so much about scaring the shit out of us (which it does very well) as it is about starting a serious and sober discussion about what to actually do about the threat (which it has also done). Bostrom’s vision alarmed enough influential people—Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, among others—to trigger a soul-searching about the future of AI that is still unfolding. Gates and Hawking are among the backers of Bostrom’s not-so-humbly-named Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, which has raised more than $25 million since 2015. The driverless revolution hardly needs superintelligence.


pages: 342 words: 101,370

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

People gasped amid dizzying strobes and pumping music. When the SUV stopped, Branson got out and marveled at the ship. “Isn’t she beautiful?” He recommended we all pinch ourselves. The lights dimmed, and on the screens that had projected Yousafzai’s image a single eyeball now appeared. The eyeball belonged to Stephen Hawking, the cosmologist and quantum physicist, whose work on the mysteries of time and the universe had done as much as anyone’s to deepen our fascination with all that lies beyond. Branson recalled once hearing Hawking on the radio say that his dream was to fly to space, prompting Branson to call Hawking and offer him a seat on SpaceShipTwo.


pages: 357 words: 99,456

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

How to pull that off? The main thing is, don’t break the spell. A professional sportscaster in America may do just about anything in public, even things that from the outside appear to stretch the absolute limits of human idiocy. He or she may howl like a child over a missed free throw, treat Jeff Fisher like Stephen Hawking, report the seventh round of the NFL draft like the Nuremburg trial, ask an athlete to measure his bicep mid-interview, or even fart on the air. The one thing Mr. Sportscaster can’t ever do is remind audiences it’s just a game. He or she can’t ever tell them it’s okay not to care. In fact, the two most taboo lines in all media in America are I don’t know and I don’t care.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendshoring, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Enter Homo deus, says Harari, which is smarter, stronger, and immortal so long as knowledge can move from one machine to the next iteration. Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, the author of Superintelligence, ranks artificial intelligence next to giant asteroid strikes and nuclear war as an existential threat to humanity. The late mathematician Stephen Hawking worried that AI “could spell the end of the human race.” That is why he suggested that humans should move to other planets—as the machine will take over not only all jobs but also the human race. Tesla founder Elon Musk welcomes AI that controls electric cars his company makes, but putting AI in ultimate charge worries him.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

He’d been teaching Bar-Yam’s textbook, Dynamics of Complex Systems, to his class at NYU, and saw interesting connections between Bar-Yam’s specialty, complexity theory, and his own idiosyncratic Black Swan worldview. Bar-Yam, he came to believe, was the world’s leading expert in complexity theory. It was a big claim. No less an authority than Stephen Hawking proclaimed, “Complexity is the science of the twenty-first century.” Not only founder of NECSI but also chair of the International Conference on Complex Systems, Bar-Yam had long been at the very forefront of the complexity pack. The study of complex systems is an analysis of the interrelations and emerging properties of systems and their parts and their connections to the larger world (there are hundreds of definitions of complex systems, and not all align).


pages: 345 words: 104,404

Pandora's Brain by Calum Chace

AI winter, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Extropian, friendly AI, hive mind, lateral thinking, machine translation, mega-rich, Nick Bostrom, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, theory of mind, Turing test, Wall-E

Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, little serious research is devoted to these issues . . . All of us — not only scientists, industrialists and generals — should ask ourselves what can we do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks.’ Stephen Hawking, April 2014 SELECTED REVIEWS FOR PANDORA’S BRAIN ‘I love the concepts in this book!’ Peter James, author of the best-selling Roy Grace series ‘Pandora’s Brain is a captivating tale of developments in artificial intelligence that could, conceivably, be just around the corner. The imminent possibility of these breakthroughs causes characters in the book to re-evaluate many of their cherished beliefs, and will lead most readers to several ‘OMG’ realisations about their own philosophies of life.


pages: 385 words: 105,627

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester

Berlin Wall, British Empire, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of gunpowder, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Ted Kaczynski, trade route

His typing was always very accurate; his first script was always his final draft, and it was from these drafts that the Cambridge University Press prepared its galleys (these, by contrast, usually required many changes—edits which he often performed in his head, while lying awake in bed). Needham working in K-1, the room in Caius College, Cambridge, that he occupied for almost seventy years. Later he also took the room next door, now occupied by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking. He did not take kindly to interruption, and though generally a polite and thoughtful man, could be crashingly rude if disturbed. Once when his old friend Julian Huxley, who had been the first director general of UNESCO, telephoned from the porter’s lodge to announce that he had arrived for a visit, Needham said, with glacial courtesy, “I am frightfully busy.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

By removing the friction from everyday activities, it makes for more productive lives. TOWARD A UNIFIED THEORY OF LOVE July 30, 2015 WE LIVE MYTHICALLY, EVEN the most calculating of us. In the middle of a bromidic Q&A session on Facebook last month, Mark Zuckerberg fielded a question from the cosmologist Stephen Hawking: “I would like to know a unified theory of gravity and the other forces. Which of the big questions in science would you like to know the answer to and why?” Zuckerberg replied that he was “most interested in questions about people,” and he gave some examples of the questions about people that he found most interesting.


pages: 460 words: 107,712

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

But it isn’t. As far as I can tell, my ‘atheistic’ views are identical to Ursula Goodenough’s ‘religious’ ones. One of us is misusing the English language, and I don’t think it’s me. She happens to be a biologist but this kind of neo-deistic pseudo-religion is more often associated with physicists. In Stephen Hawking’s case, I hasten to insist, the accusation is unjust. His much quoted phrase ‘The Mind of God’ no more indicates belief in God than does my ‘God knows!’ (as a way of saying that I don’t). I suspect the same of Einstein’s picturesque invoking of the ‘Dear Lord’ to personify the laws of physics1.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

If I put up a blog post in the morning and get several comments before lunchtime along the lines of “That’s about as wrong as anything I’ve ever seen you write” or “What were you thinking?” complete with links to sources that set me straight, it’s difficult to simply pretend I don’t notice. I once heard, as an example of how online communication was degrading our discourse by drowning us in lies and misinformation, the crazy claim that Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have been cared for under the United Kingdom’s National Health Service—which, of course, is exactly what did care for him, thus offering an unusually juicy self-refutation. But bringing up this example as a criticism of the Internet is equally self-refuting. The initial lie didn’t appear online but in a good, old-fashioned newspaper.


pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

And his entrance—to the requisite pumping music, swirling lights, and chilled champagne—fulfilled the Branson stereotype and satisfied those who had come expecting a red-carpet show from one of the world’s most celebrated playboys. Branson was more than happy to play the part, with his rock star leather jacket and jeans, flowing hair, perma-white smile, and British charm. Harrison Ford, Han Solo himself, was sitting in the front row. But the real star power of the day came from the world’s premier celebrity physicist, Stephen Hawking. Inside the company, its officials were worried about coming off as too cavalier in the wake of the fatal accident. They wanted to put on a show glamorous enough to erase some of the pain, and to restore confidence, but they were also very cognizant of crossing a line—especially when they were years behind schedule and had still not flown a single paying customer.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

When Tristan and I started speaking out, I hoped that Facebook employees and alumni would join the cause and that people like Sean Parker and Chamath Palihapitiya might succeed in convincing Zuck and Sheryl to change their approach. That did not happen. 8 Facebook Digs in Its Heels Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. —STEPHEN HAWKING When a company grows from nothing to 2.2 billion active users and forty billion dollars in revenues in only fourteen years, you can be sure of three things: First, the original idea was brilliant. Second, execution of the business plan had to be nearly flawless. And third, at some point along the way, the people who manage the company will lose perspective.


pages: 427 words: 111,965

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, climate change refugee, cross-subsidies, decarbonisation, Doomsday Clock, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Gregor Mendel, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Medieval Warm Period, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, uranium enrichment, Y2K

No clothes could be washed, no toilets would flush, filth would accumulate and people would become thirsty very quickly. And imagine the result if petrol supplies came to a halt. Food could not be delivered, garbage wouldn’t be removed, and people couldn’t get to work. Could climate change threaten the resources required by cities to survive? Physicist Stephen Hawking has said that within a thousand years increasing CO2 will boil the surface of our planet and humans will need to seek refuge elsewhere. This is an extreme opinion. More mainstream are the views of Jared Diamond, who has examined civilisations that have collapsed in the past.1 He has found that exhaustion of the resource base is a key reason why even large, complex, literate societies such as the Maya failed.


pages: 344 words: 104,077

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

.: Rossum’s Universal Robots—the 1920 play that introduced the word robot to the English language 17—to the film The Terminator and its sequels, stories of human creations turning against their creators have been a staple of science fiction. Even though these examples are pure fantasy, they have made it very easy for us to imagine this actually happening. But with recent progress in AI, some very smart people, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and my MIT colleague Max Tegmark, have begun to believe that the risks of this actually happening are large enough for us to take them seriously. In fact, Hawking, Tegmark, and others have formed the Future of Life Institute to study these and other existential risks to humanity.18 One of the most complete and carefully reasoned descriptions of the problem is in the book Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom.19 Bostrom carefully analyzes various ways that artificially intelligent systems (AIs) could eventually reach human-level intelligence.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

The reason this fanciful exercise is worth doing is because, while it is inevitable that we will manufacture intelligences in all that we make, it is not inevitable or obvious what their character will be. Their character will dictate their economic value and their roles in our culture. Outlining the possible ways that a machine might be smarter than us (even in theory) will assist us in both directing this advance and managing it. A few really smart people, like astronomer Stephen Hawking and genius inventor Elon Musk, worry that making supersmart AIs could be our last invention before they replace us (though I don’t believe this), so exploring possible types is prudent. Imagine we land on an alien planet. How would we measure the level of the intelligences we encounter there?


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

But anyone who is bothering to read an introduction by an SF novelist to a book about infinity by DFW probably has examples of all four types on her bookshelf and so this will be left, as the saying goes, as an exercise for the reader. Just to be clear, though, I will list some examples: Type 1: Any fiction by Gregory Benford Type 2: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Type 3: 1491 by Charles Mann Type 4: Einstein in Berlin by Tom Levenson What is clearly true about all of these types of books is that they are safe to write, in the sense that critically-minded readers from the academic world will fairly quickly say to themselves, “ah, this is one of those” and then, if they wish to criticize them, will do so according to the rules of that type.


pages: 378 words: 107,957

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

It is accurate to say that what we know about reality depends upon the models of reality that we put forward to explain it. Where the postmodern view goes wrong is assuming that this is a catastrophe for scientific knowledge production. The truth is, this fact isn’t alarming to any serious scientist or philosopher of science. Indeed, in their book The Grand Design (2012), Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow explain this way of interpreting the world, which they call “model-dependent realism” (New York: Bantam Books, 2010). In this approach, we formulate mostly linguistic constructs called models that explain phenomena, and we examine the evidence we can gather about the world to determine how consistent it is with those models.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

Economists deal with controversial issues such as inequality, taxation, public spending, climate change, trade, immigration, and, of course, Brexit. In such a febrile environment, speaking slowly and clearly will only get you so far. To communicate complex ideas, we needed to spark people’s curiosity—even inspire a sense of wonder. After all, the great science communicators—people such as Stephen Hawking and David Attenborough—do not win people over simply by using small words, crisply spoken. They stoke the flames of our curiosity, making us burn with desire to learn more. If we economists want people to understand economics, we must first engage their interest. What is true of economists is equally true for scientists, social scientists, historians, statisticians, and anyone else with complex ideas to convey.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

After a prolonged winter, neural networks were beginning to come in from the cold. Dean Pomerleau was working on his self-driving car at Carnegie Mellon. Meanwhile, Sejnowski was making waves with something he called “NETtalk.” Using a hardware device that could generate synthetic sounds—a bit like the robotic speech box used by the British physicist Stephen Hawking after a neurodegenerative disorder took his voice—Sejnowski built a neural network that could learn to read aloud. As it analyzed children’s books filled with English words and their matching phonemes (how each letter was pronounced), it could pronounce other words on its own. It could learn when a “gh” was pronounced like an “f” (as in “enough”) and when a “ti” was pronounced “sh” (as in “nation”).


pages: 394 words: 107,778

The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey

airport security, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, COVID-19, crew resource management, glass ceiling, human-factors engineering, index card, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking

Sally Ride—the first American woman in space—step out of the Roosevelt Room to greet me. It was the only time I ever met her in person. My family and I met Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office. I could immediately see why women found him so charismatic and charming. He spoke of meeting and being impressed by the famous physicist Stephen Hawking. Mrs. Clinton talked about wanting to be an astronaut when she was a teenager. President Clinton was interested that Pat was a scratch golfer. He even mentioned Pat’s golf game in his remarks to the press! Someone came in and said, “It’s time.” I walked across the reception area to the Roosevelt Room and peeked in the door.


Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability Through Risk Control by Kenneth L. Grant

backtesting, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, George Santayana, global macro, implied volatility, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market design, Myron Scholes, performance metric, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two-sided market, uptick rule, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

If Einstein and his cohorts like Fermi ever got into the business of trading, they would probably prefer complex instruments, such as 56 TRADING RISK derivatives. No doubt they would do well; but even here, they’d be the first to acknowledge their heavy debt to Newton. It is therefore to the memory of that learned second holder of the Lucasian chair at Cambridge University (a spot currently occupied by that miracle of modern science, Stephen Hawking) that I dedicate my statistical tool kit. If we can look at the market universe with a measure of Newton’s intellectual efficiency, we may live to avoid if not the big crunch, then at least at least the apples that seem to be forever falling on the heads of unwitting market participants. Before we turn to the numbers, one additional word of caution is perhaps required.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

As mentioned from the very beginning, the objective of this book has been to change the direction of the conversation that we have today with regards to capitalism. As we have seen in these four chapters, this conversation has already begun in some academic and policy circles. My objective has been to give these conversations a collective voice. Conclusion ‘I think the next century will be the century of complexity’, Stephen Hawking, January 2000 Economics and Ecology share a common etymological origin. They both derive themselves from the Greek word for household - ‘Oikos’. ‘Logy’, derives itself from another Greek word, ‘Logos’ (from legein), which means to gather, count, or account. ‘Nomos’, on the other hand, derives itself from the Greek ‘Nemein’, which means to distribute or to manage.


pages: 412 words: 115,266

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, cognitive load, end world poverty, endowment effect, energy security, experimental subject, framing effect, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, impulse control, John Nash: game theory, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monty Hall problem, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, ultimatum game, World Values Survey

While I’m not at all sure that it exhausts this mystery, I think there is something to be said for Craik’s idea (Craik, 1943) that an isomorphism between brain processes and the processes in the world that they represent might account for the utility of numbers and certain mathematical operations. Is it really so surprising that certain patterns of brain activity (i.e., numbers) can map reliably onto the world? 77. Collins also has a terrible tendency of cherry-picking and misrepresenting the views of famous scientists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. For instance he writes: Even Albert Einstein saw the poverty of a purely naturalistic worldview. Choosing his words carefully, he wrote, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” The one choosing words carefully here is Collins. As we saw above, when read in context (Einstein, 1954, pp. 41–49), this quote reveals that Einstein did not in the least endorse theism and that his use of the word “God” was a poetical way of referring to the laws of nature.


Discover Great Britain by Lonely Planet

British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, G4S, gentrification, global village, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, New Urbanism, Stephen Hawking

Gonville & Caius College College Offline map Google map (www.cai.cam.ac.uk; Trinity St; admission free) Known locally as Caius (pronounced 'keys'), Gonville and Caius was founded twice, first by a priest called Gonville, in 1348, and then again in 1557 by Dr Caius (his given name was Keys – it was common for academics to use the Latin form of their names), a brilliant physician who supposedly spoilt his legacy by insisting the college admit no ‘deaf, dumb, deformed, lame, chronic invalids, or Welshmen’! Fortunately for the college, his policy didn’t last long, and the wheelchair-using megastar of astrophysics, Stephen Hawking, is now a fellow here. If You Like... Cambridge Colleges If you love the architecture and academic ambience of big-hitters such as Trinity and Caius, you may like to explore some of Cambridge’s other colleges: 1 Peterhouse (www.pet.cam.ac.uk; Trumpington St; admission free) The oldest and smallest college in Cambridge, Peterhouse is a charming place founded in 1284.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

We have clearly been inoculated with the idea, however, after exposure to cumulative doses of Skynet in The Terminator, HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Agent Smith in The Matrix. These extremely popular films portrayed sentient machines with artificial general intelligence, and many sci-fi movies have proven to be prescient, so fears about AI shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.73 We’ve heard doom projections from high-profile figures like Stephen Hawking (“the development of full AI could spell the end of the human race”), Elon Musk (“with AI we are summoning the demon”), Henry Kissinger (“could cause a rupture in history and unravel the way civilization works”), Bill Gates (“potentially more dangerous than a nuclear catastrophe”), and others.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Lady Byron was worried the condition might be hereditary and thus steered her daughter away from anything that might bring on such troubles. The tutoring paid off. In 1833, when Ada was seventeen, her life took a turn for the computational. It was then that she met Charles Babbage, who held the same chair at Cambridge University that had been once occupied by Isaac Newton and would later belong to Stephen Hawking. After learning of her love of math, Babbage invited Ada and her mother to see his “difference engine,” his steam-powered calculating machine. Stunned by what she saw, Ada was determined to understand it. She got a copy of the machine’s blueprints from Babbage. And she studied. And studied. And when Babbage created the next version of the difference engine, this time renamed the “analytical engine,” Ada was ready.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

What it is like is that the rest of the world is moving in slow motion, and it is excruciating. The lanes painted on the road appear acres wide. The enclosed, lumbering objects you share the road with are essentially standing still, and it makes no sense to abide by their rules. Imagine you are Stephen Hawking and you wake up one day to discover that you have switched bodies with Stephen Curry. The life you have lived up to that point is no longer livable. However great the intellectual pleasures of black holes and equations, you suddenly have before you an unexpected cosmos that is deeply animal, an expanding universe that recedes from your present abilities and calls you forward: faster.


pages: 368 words: 115,889

How Not to Grow Up: A Coming of Age Memoir. Sort Of. by Richard Herring

British Empire, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Russell Brand, Stephen Hawking

They were all getting so much out of what they were doing that it was impossible not to be carried along with their joy. Indeed, despite my unimaginative prejudices, every single child was able to play a meaningful role. With the assistance of the staff, the less mobile could move around and with the help of Stephen Hawking-style voice synthesisers those who couldn’t speak could deliver their lines. It didn’t take long before I forgot about their disabilities and my engrained attitudes and realised that like much so-called ‘common sense’, my previous ideas had come from a place of ignorance. These students, regardless of their disabilities, were just children like any others.


Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

They also like building with toys like blocks, Legos, and Erector sets, or putting things together with materials they find around the house, such as cardboard or wood. They may light up at the sight of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle or spend hours in the basement or garage tinkering with tools or electronics, taking things apart and putting them back together. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking took apart model trains and airplanes before making a simple computer out of recycled clock and telephone parts. Pioneering computer scientist and mathematician Grace Murray Hopper took apart all seven of the clocks in her family home. You probably wouldn’t be happy if your teen took apart your laptop, though you might be happier if he or she turned out to be the next Steve Wozniak.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

As of yet, what we call “artificial intelligence” is not sentient, and in a basic sense it is not yet artificial nor intelligent. AI tools are human-made tools that help us humans understand and direct the complexity of our world. The fears surrounding AI oscillate between its nascent reality and its omnipotent future. Thought leaders and industry moguls from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk have warned that at a critical moment when AI becomes independent, the human race should be quite concerned about its own survival. Hawking wrote, “The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.”


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

For instance, markets are useful, but extreme libertarian beliefs along the lines that markets should be the only organizing principle in human affairs—or that an unregulated market will always tend toward perfection—have the effect of making markets less useful. Similarly, democracy is useful, but a determination that every little decision should be undertaken through a democratic process as frequently as possible makes democracy less useful. As for religion, don’t get me started. 10.   Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are the primary current public faces of this fear. 11.   Hopefully this doesn’t make my ideas marginal. 12.   The sexual singularity is the hypothetical future moment after which virtual reality sex would be more appealing than real sex, and, according to the typical framing, women would lose their power over men. 13.   


pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Charles Babbage If there were a hall of fame of intelligent people, Charles Babbage (1791–1871) would surely have his own plaque. Born into a well-to-do family, he spent most of his career in academia and for a dozen years held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a post graced by luminaries from Isaac Newton through Stephen Hawking.24 In Babbage’s day, all calculation-intensive sciences like astronomy were dependent on thick volumes of standard tables—logarithms, sines, and other functions—each incorporating decades of laborious construction. As a newly minted mathematician, Babbage realized that even the best tables were riddled with errors.


pages: 381 words: 120,361

Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili

airport security, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bletchley Park, Carrington event, cosmological constant, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Attenborough, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, pattern recognition, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Turing test

He has written ten books, translated into over twenty languages. He is a regular presenter of TV science documentaries and also presents the long-running weekly BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific. A recipient of the Royal Society Michael Faraday Medal, the Institute of Physics Kelvin Medal and the inaugural Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, he is also the current president of the British Science Association. He was appointed OBE in 2007 for services to science and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2018. Sunfall is his first novel. Also by Jim Al-Khalili BLACK HOLES, WORMHOLES AND TIME MACHINES QUANTUM: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED PATHFINDERS: THE GOLDEN AGE OF ARABIC SCIENCE PARADOX: THE NINE GREATEST ENIGMAS IN SCIENCE QUANTUM MECHANICS: A LADYBIRD EXPERT BOOK GRAVITY: A LADYBIRD EXPERT BOOK With Johnjoe McFadden LIFE ON THE EDGE: THE COMING OF AGE OF QUANTUM BIOLOGY With Ray Mackintosh, Björn Jonson and Teresa Peña NUCLEUS: A TRIP INTO THE HEART OF MATTER As editor ALIENS: SCIENCE ASKS: IS ANYONE OUT THERE?


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

Not all that inspired by specks.4 Unlikely as it may sound, this is also a man who’s received the prestigious Albert Medal from the Royal Society of Arts in London, ranking him with the likes of Tim Berners-Lee, brain behind the World Wide Web; Francis Crick, who unravelled the structure of DNA; and the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking. In November 2014, it was Jos de Blok from small-town Holland who received the honour and the cream of British academia turned out to attend his keynote speech. In broken English, De Blok confessed that at first he thought it was a joke. But it was no joke. It was high time. 2 To understand what makes de Blok’s ideas so revolutionary – and on par with cracking DNA – we have to go back to the beginning of the twentieth century.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

The honour roll of famous Cambridge graduates reads like an international who’s who of high achievers: 81 Nobel Prize winners (more than any other institution in the world), 13 British prime ministers, nine archbishops of Canterbury, an immense number of scientists, and a healthy host of poets and authors. Crick and Watson discovered DNA here, Isaac Newton used Cambridge to work on his theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking is a professor of mathematics here, and Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, David Attenborough and John Cleese all studied here. Today the university remains one of the top three for research worldwide, and international academics have polled it as the top university in the world for science.

Gonville & Caius College Known locally as Caius (pronounced keys), Gonville and Caius ( 01223-332400; www.cai.cam.ac.uk; Trinity St) was founded twice, first by a priest called Gonville, in 1348, and then again in 1557 by Dr Caius (Keys – it was common for academics to use the Latin form of their names), a brilliant physician who supposedly spoilt his legacy by insisting the college admit no ‘deaf, dumb, deformed, lame, chronic invalids, or Welshmen’! Fortunately for the college his policy didn’t last long, and the wheelchair-using megastar of astrophysics, Stephen Hawking, is now a fellow here. The college is of particular interest thanks to its three fascinating gates: Virtue, Humility and Honour. They symbolise the progress of the good student, since the third gate (the Porta Honoris, a fabulous domed and sundial-sided confection) leads to the Senate House and thus graduation.

Wedged cosily among the great and the famous, but unconnected to better-known Trinity, it was founded in 1350 as a refuge for lawyers and clerics escaping the ravages of the Black Death, thus earning it the nickname of the ‘Lawyers’ College’. The college’s 16th-century library has original Jacobean reading desks and chained books (an early antitheft device) on the shelves. Writer JB Priestley, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and actress Rachel Weisz are among Trinity Hall’s graduates. St John’s College After King’s College, St John’s ( 01223-338600; www.joh.cam.ac.uk; St John’s St; adult/child £2.80/1.70; 10am-5pm Mon-Fri, 9.30am-5pm Sat & Sun Mar-Oct, Sat & Sun only Nov-Feb) is one of the city’s most photogenic colleges, and is also the second-biggest after Trinity.


pages: 1,013 words: 302,015

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

As he spoke, a demonstration by disabled people outside Parliament saw thirty or so campaigners abandon their wheelchairs and drag themselves painfully up the steps of the public entrance to the House, where their progress was blocked by police officers. It wasn’t the Conservative Party’s finest hour. Professor Stephen Hawking, the country’s best-known scientist, who was afflicted with a motor neurone disease, joined the condemnation: ‘I don’t think any disabled person should vote for the present government unless they do something to atone for the shabby way they killed the Civil Rights Bill.’ There was subsequently some expiation with the passage of the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995, a weaker measure which made it unlawful to discriminate against people with disabilities, though without the requirement for access.

‘We desperately need to make a new start, to draw a line under the past, to reinvent ourselves,’ he argued, calling instead for a celebration of a cosmopolitan, meritocratic, ethnically diverse country that could be part of Europe, and citing as symbols of this new Britain the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Stephen Hawking, Richard Branson and the Olympic gold medal-winning athlete Linford Christie. This was to be the dominant strand of thinking on the centre-left over the next few years, an attempt to shed much of Britain’s past and to discover a new identity in a post-Thatcher world. It reached its most articulate expression in Mark Leonard’s pamphlet Britain™, published by the think tank Demos in 1997.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

“I’m not afraid of general intelligence in a computer,” Gruber says. “It will happen and I like it. I’m looking forward to it. It’s like being afraid of nuclear power—you know, if we designed nuclear technology knowing what we know now, we could make it safe, probably.” Yet critics like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have raised concerns that AI could evolve more quickly than we could control it—that it could pose an existential threat to humanity. “Oh, it’s great,” Gruber says of the discussion. “We’re kind of at the stage now where the Elon Musks of the world are saying, ‘Look, this is going to be powerful enough to destroy the earth.


pages: 435 words: 136,906

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

The differentness required to make a real difference in the world is fueled by independence of thought, daydreaming, making up new rules, and fidgeting with gadgets. Because gifted children often have trouble finding same-age peers who think and wonder like they do, or who share their unusual stick-to-it-iveness, they delve into their interests with gusto, not in an effort to be oppositional, but because they must. When Stephen Hawking was growing up in England his teachers considered him smart but nothing special. In the sight of others, his genius abilities emerged gradually. Yet perhaps one of the earlier indicators of his brilliance was the type of game he enjoyed. Like so many developing gifted children, Hawking liked to devise his own games, making up rules complicated enough to challenge himself, but so intricate that his peers gave up in frustration.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Once machines have intelligence and the ability to learn, how quickly will they become autonomous? Will military drones and robots, for example, decide to turn on civilians? According to researchers in AI, we’re only years, not decades, away from the realization of such weapons. In July 2015, a large group of scientists and researchers, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak, issued an open letter calling for a ban on the development of autonomous offensive weapons beyond meaningful human control.53 “The nightmare headline for me is, ‘100,000 Refrigerators Attack Bank of America,’” said Vint Cerf, widely regarded as the father of the Internet.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

“We all feel grateful to you,” Brin said. “Thank you, Sergey. And to you and Larry and Eric and the entire team. One of the fun things in my life is to be part of the extended Google family.” A roar of applause cascaded from the balcony and throughout the cafe, and soon Gore was gone. “He sounded a little like Stephen Hawking,” joked Page. The hand of an engineer who spends too many hours in front of a computer screen shot up. “Larry and Sergey,” he asked. “Which prize?” The personalities of the founders permeate the company. Doerr described Sergey as the “more exhuberant” of the two. “Sergey is more creative, more experimental than Larry is.”


pages: 420 words: 130,714

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

There is good evidence that the most recent common ancestor of all today’s land tortoises, including those on the mainlands of America, Australia, Africa and Eurasia, as well as the giants of Galápagos, Aldabra, the Seychelles and other oceanic islands, was itself a land tortoise. In their less ancient ancestry, to misquote Stephen Hawking, it’s tortoises all the way down. The various giant tortoises of the Galápagos Islands are certainly descended from South American land tortoises. If you go back far enough everything lived in the sea: watery alma mater of all life. At various points in evolutionary history, enterprising individuals within many different animal groups moved out onto the land, sometimes even to the most parched deserts, taking their own private sea water with them in blood and cellular fluids.


The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

Encouraged by these possibilities, I believe that strong AI with causal understanding and agency capabilities is a realizable promise, and this raises the question that science fiction writers have been asking since the 1950s: Should we be worried? Is strong AI a Pandora’s box that we should not open? Recently public figures like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have gone on record saying that we should be worried. On Twitter, Musk said that AIs were “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” In 2015, John Brockman’s website Edge.org posed as its annual question, that year asking, “What do you think about machines that think?” It drew 186 thoughtful and provocative answers (since collected into a book titled What to Think About Machines That Think).


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

PART XIV Education Smart Child Left Behind Kindergarten Hold-Backs in America One of my favorite TV shows in the 1990s was Doogie Howser, M.D. It was the intellectual side of the American Dream—if Doogie was smart enough to finish Princeton at 10, then damn the conventions, he could be a Teenage Surgeon. America rallied around young, bursting geniuses who tore through the educational system. Carl Sagan finished high school at 16. Stephen Hawking graduated Oxford at 20. Hell, Mozart toured at 6. Alas, no more. The biggest trend in education today is the opposite: holding kids back. And the “smarter” they are (or the more likely they are to succeed, statistically speaking) the greater their chances of being delayed. It’s called “red-shirting,” after the practice of keeping college athletes out a year while they grow bigger.


pages: 468 words: 137,055

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

To protect everything from taxes to medical records, you needed locks, and Myhrvold understood that public key cryptography would provide those locks. Myhrvold had been in college when Martin Gardner’s Scientific American article about RSA appeared. “I thought it was infinitely cool,” he said, and the future physicist (who would study under Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University) devoured the RSA paper as well as the Diffie-Hellman paper that inspired it. A decade later, after a software company Myhrvold had started was bought out by Microsoft, he had become one of Bill Gates’s most trusted lieutenants. He was excited about his opportunity to help get public key into the mainstream.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

For example, J. Nathan Matias conducted a large randomized experiment that posted announcements of “community rules” to a 13-million-person science discussion community on Reddit. Over the years, the community had experienced a significant amount of conflict and harassment, with commenters mocking Stephen Hawking’s medical condition during live Q&A sessions, harassing women and minorities, and deriding people with obesity with hurtful jokes and memes. Matias used automated software to post “sticky comments,” which displayed community norms at the top of a discussion, named unacceptable behavior and enforcement consequences (that violating comments would be removed), and noted that many people agreed with the norms.


pages: 509 words: 142,456

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery by Ira Rutkow

augmented reality, Charles Lindbergh, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, New Journalism, Stephen Hawking, trade route, unbiased observer, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square. Six decades later, as Hunter’s reputation flourished, he received state honors at a second funeral when his remains were reinterred in the north aisle of the nave at Westminster Abbey, near those of Ben Johnson, Sir Isaac Newton, and, afterwards, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. * * * Stephen Preston left the Boston VA hospital three days following his hernia operation. His recovery was uneventful and he returned to work four weeks later. As for me, I received my evaluation one month after rotating out of the VA. “Excellent report,” wrote the director of the residency program, “only weakness among many real strengths is technical ability.


pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

The process, Facebook researchers put it, somewhat gingerly, in an implied warning that the company did not heed, was “associated with adopting more extreme attitudes over time and misperceiving facts about current events.” But the Valley’s algorithmic ambitions only grew, to nothing less than mastery of the human mind. During a corporate event the next summer with Zuckerberg and Stephen Hawking, the physicist asked the Facebook chief, “Which of the big questions in science would you like to know the answer to and why?” Zuckerberg replied, “I’m most interested in questions about people. I’m also curious about whether there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about.


pages: 435 words: 136,741

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

The differentness required to make a real difference in the world is fueled by independence of thought, daydreaming, making up new rules, and fidgeting with gadgets. Because gifted children often have trouble finding same-age peers who think and wonder like they do, or who share their unusual stick-to-it-iveness, they delve into their interests with gusto, not in an effort to be oppositional, but because they must. When Stephen Hawking was growing up in England his teachers considered him smart but nothing special. In the sight of others, his genius abilities emerged gradually. Yet perhaps one of the earlier indicators of his brilliance was the type of game he enjoyed. Like so many developing gifted children, Hawking liked to devise his own games, making up rules complicated enough to challenge himself, but so intricate that his peers gave up in frustration.


pages: 575 words: 140,384

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

At the press conference in Pasadena, Milch described John from Cincinnati, which would be set in a Southern California beach town and revolve around a dysfunctional family of supremely talented, addiction-prone surfers. In front of the assembled reporters, Milch dropped references to Einstein, Stephen Hawking, William James, and Sigmund Freud. Though he had never surfed, Milch explained, he’d spent much of his life riding various waves of addiction to drugs, alcohol, and gambling. Addiction was a topic he knew intimately. In order to get John ready to debut immediately after the final episode of The Sopranos, later that summer, the network was rushing it through production at warp speed.


pages: 515 words: 136,938

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge

fear of failure, ghettoisation, global village, light touch regulation, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the medium is the message, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

He has a computer version of CI therapy for people who cannot come to the clinic, called AutoCITE (Automated CI Therapy), that is showing promising results. CI therapy is now being assessed in national trials throughout the United States. Taub is also on a team developing a machine to help people who are totally paralyzed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—the illness Stephen Hawking has. The machine would transmit their thoughts through brain waves that direct a computer cursor to select letters and spell words to form short sentences. He is involved in a cure for tinnitus, or ringing in the ears, that can be caused by plastic changes in the auditory cortex. Taub also wants to find out whether stroke patients can develop completely normal movement with CI therapy.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

BuzzFeed would pick up Felix Oberholzer-Gee, “BuzzFeed—The Promise of Native Advertising,” HBS No. 714-512 (Boston: Harvard Business Publishing, rev. August 15, 2014); David Rowan, “How BuzzFeed Mastered Social Sharing to Become a Media Giant for a New Era,” Wired , January 2, 2014. “virality lift” Sarah Kessler, “BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti Is the Stephen Hawking of Radical Skateboarding Birds,” Fast Company , September 14, 2012. published a paper Duncan J. Watts and Jonah Peretti, “Viral Marketing for the Real World,” Harvard Business Review , May 2007, 22–23. Procter & Gamble’s campaign Ibid. 150 million unique visitors Oberholzer-Gee, “BuzzFeed—The Promise of Native Advertising.”


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Instead, key energy consumers can focus on bringing more oil to a free market, hence reducing prices, rather than locking in oil contracts with state-owned companies to secure it from others’ reach.*67 The world of the twenty-first century seems so complex and unpredictable that even the scientific genius Stephen Hawking pessimistically asked, “In a world that is in chaos politically, socially, and environmentally, can the human race sustain another one hundred years?” The question echoes the realist pioneer Hans Morgenthau’s admonition that “Scientism has left man enriched in his technical mastery of inanimate nature, but it has left him impoverished in his quest for an answer to the riddle of the universe and of his existence in it.”77 It is a great challenge to prognosticate on a world of diffusing power and contending empires, but Morgenthau was certain of this: Globalization (the “Scientism” of today) will not alone trump the geopolitical cycles of world war, for this ultimate task of history requires more than a blind belief in rationality.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

In fact, they ape the hackers and crackers by sniffing out vulnerabilities in anything from Windows to entire banking networks. And X-Force is the virtual equivalent of the CIA, trying to penetrate the mind-set and logic of the enemy. At times, Peter Allor’s explanations of what X-Force actually does sound as mind-bending as the most impenetrable passages from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. “You’re familiar with darknet, right?” he asks me. I shuffle and cough a little, not wanting to appear stupid. “Errm…not terribly familiar, no.” Okay. Darknet is a set of IPs [Internet protocols, for the uninitiated] that have never been addressed—they were never assigned anywhere…they’re dark, so nothing should ever come out of them and nothing should ever be addressed to them.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

In the short term, this is nothing less than miraculous for people who are totally paralyzed. One day, they are trapped, helpless, in their bodies; the next day, they are surfing the Web and carrying on conversations with people around the world. (I once attended a gala reception at Lincoln Center in New York in honor of the great cosmologist Stephen Hawking. It was heartbreaking to see him strapped into a wheelchair, unable to move anything but a few facial muscles and his eyelids, with nurses holding up his limp head and pushing him around. It takes him hours and days of excruciating effort to communicate simple ideas via his voice synthesizer.


pages: 541 words: 146,445

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

airport security, Colonization of Mars, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, rolodex, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

* * * * * During lunch I secured a table at the back of the staff cafeteria, where I nursed a coffee, watched rain fall on the parking lot, and perused the magazine Molly had given me. If there were a science of Spinology, the lead article began, Jason Lawton would be its Newton, its Einstein, its Stephen Hawking. Which was what E.D. had always encouraged the press to say and what Jase had always dreaded hearing. From radiological surveys to permeability studies, from hard-core science to philosophical debate, there is hardly an area of Spin study his ideas haven't touched and transformed. His published papers are numerous and oft-cited.


pages: 478 words: 149,810

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

A member of the group, whose nickname was VSR, created a YouTube account called Church0fScientology, and the group spent the next several hours finding uncopyrighted footage and music, then writing a video script that could be narrated by an automated voice. The speech recognition technology was so bad they had to go back and misspell most of the words—destroyed became “dee stroid,” for instance—to make it sound natural. The final script ended up looking like nonsense but sounding like normal prose. When they finally put it together, a Stephen Hawking–style robotic voice said over an image of dark clouds, “Hello, leaders of Scientology, we are Anonymous.” It climbed to new heights of hyperbole, vowing to “systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its current form.…For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind—for the laughs—we shall expel you from the Internet.”


pages: 560 words: 158,238

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

airport security, bioinformatics, bread and circuses, Burning Man, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, DeepMind, Donner party, full employment, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, iterative process, Kim Stanley Robinson, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

We should have a scientist candidate for president, some emeritus biggie who can talk, explaining what the scientific approach would be, and why. A candidate using ecological theory, systems theory, what-have-you, in-out throughputs, some actual economics. . . .” Diane was shaking her head. “Who exactly would that be?” “I don’t know, Richard Feynman?” “Deceased.” “Stephen Hawking.” “British, and paralyzed. Besides, you know those emeritus guys. There isn’t a single one of them who could go through the whole process without, I don’t know. . . .” “Exploding?” Anna suggested. “Yes.” “Make up a candidate,” Anna said. “What science would do if it were in the White House.”


pages: 547 words: 160,071

Underground by Suelette Dreyfus

airport security, Free Software Foundation, invisible hand, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Loma Prieta earthquake, military-industrial complex, packet switching, PalmPilot, pirate software, profit motive, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, zero day

Left-leaning in his politics – heading toward environmentally green parties and anarchy rather than traditional labour parties. Smokes a little dope and drinks alcohol, but doesn’t touch the hard stuff. His musical tastes include early Pink Floyd, Sullen, Dog Eat Dog, Biohazard, old Ice-T, Therapy?, Alanis Morissette, Rage Against the Machine, Fear Factory, Life of Agony and Napalm Death. He reads Stephen King, Stephen Hawking, Tom Clancy and Aldous Huxley. And any good books about physics, chemistry or mathematics. Shy in person, he doesn’t like organised team sports and is not very confident around girls. He has only had one serious girlfriend, but the relationship finished. Now that he hacks and codes about four to five hours per day on average, but sometimes up to 36 hours straight, he doesn’t have time for girls.


pages: 608 words: 150,324

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, post-materialism, Recombinant DNA, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

The developments in mathematical thinking about information, codes and control that had occurred during the war were being popularised at the very same time as the biological community was coming to terms with the implications of Avery’s discovery. –FIVE– THE AGE OF CONTROL In his 1988 best-seller A Brief History of Time, the physicist Stephen Hawking recounts that his editor told him that every equation he used would halve the potential readership. Hawking obligingly included just one equation (e = mc2) and the book went on to sell more than 10 million copies. Things were clearly different back in the 1940s – Norbert Wiener’s 1948 popular science book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was stuffed full of hundreds of complicated equations, and yet it became a publishing sensation around the world.


pages: 467 words: 154,960

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Thomas A. Stewart, How to Think With Your Gut, Business 2.0 (November 2002). See http://www.business20.com/articles/mag/print/ 0,1643,44584,FF.html. 7. See www.2think.org. 8. Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter M. Todd, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 14. 9. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. 416 Trend Following (Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets 10. Gerd Gigerenzer and Peter M. Todd, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 358. 11. Futures, Vol. 22, No.12 (November 1993), 98. 12.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

* * * 1999 from the pages of Forbes Charles Simonyi, Microsoft tech wizard, lives in a twenty-two-thousand-square-foot, totally wired, glass and steel house, complete with heliport and revolving bed. (1999 net worth: $1.5 billion) Nathan Myhrvold, also a Microsoft alumnus, studied at Cambridge University with Stephen Hawking and spends up to $10,000 a month on books. (1999 net worth: $650 million) Frank Lyon Jr., who made his fortune in Coca-Cola bottling and banks, is often seen on his tractor farming rice and soybeans. (1999 net worth: $700 million) Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo fly coach, park their own cars, and eschew offices for cubicles. (1999 net worth: $3.7 billion each) * * * The rise of the billionaires has had a dramatic effect on a number of monied enclaves across the country, not least Palm Beach, Florida, where mansions regularly change hands for $20 million and up.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Though the direst of their predictions did not come to pass, in focusing so intently on the food production–population relationship Malthus and the Ehrlichs may actually have underestimated the greater and longer-term risk—not mass starvation that might claim hundreds of millions of lives but a planetary rebellion that will kill us all. In November 2016, the late physicist Stephen Hawking predicted that humanity had less than 1,000 years left on “our fragile planet.” A few months of contemplation later, he revised his estimate downward by 90 percent. Echoing Fenner’s warnings, Hawking believed that humanity would have 100 years to find a new place to live. “We are running out of space on Earth,” he said.


The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

See also K. Tate, “Cosmic Inflation: How It Gave the Universe the Ultimate Kickstart,” Space.com, last modified March 17, 2014, https://www.space.com/25075-cosmic-inflation-universe-expansion-big-bang-infographic.html. See also “The Origins of the Universe: Inflation,” University of Cambridge, Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology online, accessed October 14, 2019, http://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/outreach/origins/inflation_zero.php. 28.W. Johnson and R. Riegel, “Where Did All the Elements Come From?,” MIT Haystack Observatory, accessed October 14, 2019, https://www.haystack.mit.edu/edu/pcr/Astrochemistry/3%20-%20MATTER/nuclear%20synthesis.pdf. 29.About the phrase “light as we see it didn’t exist yet”: Those fresh and free electrons turning heads were doing so in a very real way for primordial photons, scattering them every which way.


pages: 525 words: 147,008

SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal

autism spectrum disorder, data science, full employment, game design, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mirror neurons, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, social intelligence, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel

Although he suspected that some people might not understand how a game could help with such a serious diagnosis, Aaron wanted to spread the word to other ALS patients about the difference a gameful approach could make. “I am under no illusions that positive thinking will do much for the outcome of my disease. Stephen Hawking aside, virtually no one survives more than a few years with this disease. But what SuperBetter can do, I believe, is to increase one’s quality of life, one day at a time.” SuperBetter gave Aaron and his wife a concrete and positive way to help his two daughters, ages five and eight, adjust to the family’s new difficult reality.


pages: 542 words: 163,735

The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke

AOL-Time Warner, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, hydroponic farming, Mercator projection, Stephen Hawking

— feeling that something outside of me was dictating those words, and even now they raise the hairs on the back of my neck. For I appear to have anticipated, by about twenty years, one of the most unexpected results of modern cosmology. My “Black Sun” is obviously a Black Hole (the term did not come into use until the 1960s), and in 1974 Stephen Hawking made the stunning discovery that Black Holes are not permanent but can “die,” just as I suggested. (To be technical, they “evaporate” by quantum tunneling.) And then they can become informational white noise sources, shooting out (if you wait long enough) anything you care to specify. Including Mad Minds….


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Intended to demonstrate that faith and science are compatible, it dates to 1847, when shortly after his election, Pope Pius IX resurrected a former Roman scientific academy once led by Galileo. Today, about eighty scientists from around the world are members, a quarter of them Nobel laureates. Its roster includes non-Catholics, and even suspected atheists such as physicist Stephen Hawking. Several times a year, its scientists meet to discuss relevant contemporary issues and publish the proceedings. In the early years of his nearly thirty-two-year reign, the Academy’s founder, Pius IX, was a popular liberal reformer. He was also the last head of the Papal States—land that encompassed much of today’s central Italy, which the Church had acquired from wealthy adherents, including emperors Constantine and Charlemagne.


pages: 571 words: 162,958

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology by James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel

back-to-the-land, Columbine, dark matter, Extropian, Firefox, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, haute couture, Internet Archive, Kim Stanley Robinson, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, price stability, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, telepresence, the scientific method, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Y2K, zero day

But spitting is muy narcocorrido.” “Oh.” The invisible lab in the paper performed an instant DNA analysis on Harnnoy’s saliva, and the door swung open. Inside the unlit windowless room, a flock of glowing floating heads awaited. The faces on the heads were all famous ones: Marilyn Monroe, Stephen Hawking, Britney Spears (the teenage version, not the middle-aged spokesperson for OpiateBusters), President Winfrey, Freeman Dyson, Walt Whitman (the celebrations for his 200th birthday ten years ago had gained him renewed prominence), Woody Woodpecker, SpongeBob SquarePants, Bart Simpson’s son Homer Junior.


pages: 506 words: 167,034

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, feminist movement, financial independence, Gene Kranz, invisible hand, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Potemkin village, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, space junk, space pen, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, your tax dollars at work

John Creighton once commented that to have Hawley in the cockpit was to have a sixth GPC aboard, a play on the fact that the shuttle computer system consisted of only five IBM General Purpose Computers (GPC). Steve had so much brainpower, the space shuttle was hardly enough to occupy him. He found additional challenges. One was to attend professional baseball umpire camp over his vacation (he was a sports addict). It wouldn’t have surprised me to have learned he was also ghostwriting Stephen Hawking’s books. Hawley was held in such high regard by the military TFNGs that the pilots christened him “Attack Astronomer.” Since pilots were particular about their own titles—fighter pilot, attack pilot, gunship pilot—Hawley’s title was an honorific. Steve was recently married to Sally Ride and for the sake of that marriage he was trying to distance himself from us AD bottom feeders.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

But this metal serves also for war, murder and robbery; and not only at close quarters, man to man, but also by projection and flight; for it can be hurled either by ballistic machines, or by the strength of human arms or even in the form of arrows. And this I hold to be the most blameworthy product of the human mind.6 Much like the fears surrounding the disruptive effects of artificial intelligence (AI) today, with scholars like Stephen Hawking and Nick Bostrom suggesting that it could spell the end of human civilization, people in preindustrial times worried that technology could destroy their much smaller and more isolated world. This was not just a worry of Pliny the Elder but the intuition that shaped attitudes toward technological progress among elites throughout classical antiquity (around 500 B.C. to A.D. 500).


pages: 558 words: 175,965

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

We decided that we wanted to find a way to live like this all the time, and so we decided to form a space kibbutz. We wanted to live in the same place and combine forces, and that is what eventually became the Rainbow Mansion.” In 2000, Marshall began pursuing a doctorate in physics at Oxford. He studied under Roger Penrose, a Nobel laureate who conducted groundbreaking physics research alongside Stephen Hawking. Marshall spent four years aiding Penrose with some of his concepts for experiments into the fundamental nature of the universe. All the while, he kept up his relationships with the young space crew, while also feeding off the political and societal discourse at Oxford. By the end of his studies, he concluded that he could not keep pace with the world’s top theoretical physicists and would be better served by directing his talents toward accomplishing something tangible in space.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

The honour roll of famous Cambridge graduates reads like an international who’s who of high achievers: 81 Nobel Prize winners (more than any other institution in the world), 13 British prime ministers, nine archbishops of Canterbury, an immense number of scientists, and a healthy host of poets and authors. Crick and Watson discovered DNA here, Isaac Newton used Cambridge to work on his theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking is a professor of mathematics here, and Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, David Attenborough and John Cleese all studied here. The university celebrates its 800th birthday in 2009; look out for special events, lectures and concerts to mark its intriguing eight centuries. Orientation The colleges and university buildings comprise the centre of the city.

Gonville & Caius College Known locally as Caius (pronounced keys), Gonville and Caius ( 01223-332400; www.cai.cam.ac.uk; Trinity St) was founded twice, first by a priest called Gonville, in 1348, and then again in 1557 by Dr Caius (Keys – it was common for academics to use the Latin form of their names), a brilliant physician who supposedly spoilt his legacy by insisting the college admit no ‘deaf, dumb, deformed, lame, chronic invalids, or Welshmen’! Fortunately for the college his policy didn’t last long, and the wheelchair-using megastar of astrophysics, Stephen Hawking, is now a fellow here. The college is of particular interest thanks to its three fascinating gates: Virtue, Humility and Honour. They symbolise the progress of the good student, since the third gate (the Porta Honoris, a fabulous domed and sundial-sided confection) leads to the Senate House and thus graduation.

Wedged cosily among the great and the famous, but unconnected to better-known Trinity, it was founded in 1350 as a refuge for lawyers and clerics escaping the ravages of the Black Death, thus earning it the nickname of the ‘Lawyers’ College’. The college’s 16th-century library has original Jacobean reading desks and chained books (an early antitheft device) on the shelves. Writer JB Priestley, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and actresss Rachel Weisz are among Trinity Hall’s graduates. St John’s College After King’s College, St John’s ( 01223-338600; www.joh.cam.ac.uk; St John’s St; adult/child £2.80/1.70; 10am-5pm Mon-Fri, 9.30am-5pm Sat & Sun Mar-Oct, Sat & Sun only Nov-Feb) is one of the city’s most photogenic colleges, and is also the second-biggest after Trinity.


pages: 1,007 words: 181,911

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

Then, he became fascinated with the micro-regional cuisine of the American south: BBQ. Naturally, he competed in the 1991 World Championship of Barbecue in Memphis, Tennessee, where his team finished first place in multiple categories, including pasta.1 But then what? If you had worked on quantum theories of gravity under Stephen Hawking, were an award-winning photographer (yep, he did that, too), had earned a few hundred million dollars, and loved cooking, how might you spend your time? Nathan’s answer, a book titled Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, is what brought me to Seattle to experience a 32-course (!)


pages: 694 words: 197,804

The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis by Julie Holland

benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, confounding variable, drug harm reduction, intentional community, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Stephen Hawking, traumatic brain injury, University of East Anglia, zero-sum game

Considerable geographic clustering has been seen in association with ALS, most notably in the Western Pacific region of the world, but more recently in Gulf War veterans. Despite clustering, environmental or causal factors remain to be determined (Krivickas and Carter 2005). Young males with ALS have the best prognosis and may have a longer life expectancy. A notable example of this is theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who was diagnosed with ALS while in graduate school in his early twenties. He has now survived over four decades with the disease and continues to lecture all over the world, using a speech synthesizer activated by eye movement. Unfortunately, the typical prognosis for ALS is grim: about half of all ALS patients die within two-and-a-half years after the onset of symptoms (Krivickas and Carter 2005).


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

But like Cavendish lurking in the shadows at the Monday Club, he would often eavesdrop inconspicuously as his peers swapped stories. Oblivious to contemporary modes of dress, Dirac wore cheap, unstylish suits in all weathers until they were threadbare, even after securing a generous salary as the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (the position later held by Stephen Hawking). His mother practically had to beg him to buy a winter coat so she could stop fretting about his health. Though he seemed impervious to freezing temperatures, he was acutely sensitive to sounds—particularly the din of barking dogs, which were permanently banned from his household. Dirac’s motor skills were notoriously poor; a classmate described his method of wielding a cricket bat as “peculiarly inept.”


The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy

active measures, airport security, cuban missile crisis, false flag, invisible hand, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative

His doctor's dissertation was classified Top Secret, Jack had read it, and didn't understand why they had bothered-despite a doctorate of his own, the two-hundred-page document might as well have been written in Kurdish. Alan Gregory was already being talked of in the same breath as Cambridge's Stephen Hawking, or Princeton's Freeman Dyson, Except that few people knew his name. Jack wondered if anyone had thought of classifying that. "Major Gregory, all ready?" an Air Force lieutenant general asked. Jack noted his respectful tone. Gregory was no ordinary major. A nervous smile. "Yes, sir." The Major wiped sweaty hands-despite a temperature of fifteen below zero-on the pants of his uniform.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

It had implanted a chip into the brain of a monkey and taught it to play Pong telepathically, but so far that had mainly served to get Neuralink a lot of views on YouTube rather than transforming humanity. “Guys, this is a little hard to explain to people in a way that really grabs them,” he said as they walked around. “A paralyzed person might someday use their mind to move a cursor on a computer, and that’s kind of cool, especially for someone like a Stephen Hawking. But it’s not enough. It’s hard to get most people excited by that.” That’s when Musk started pushing the idea of using Neuralink to enable paralyzed people to actually use their limbs again. A chip in the brain could send signals to the relevant muscles, bypassing any spinal-cord blockage or neurological malfunction.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

This is likely attributed to my dad’s exposure to Agent Orange when he was in Vietnam. . . . I did a lot of painting when I was recovering from surgeries, so I had to use interesting techniques, like crawling on the floor to make the painting because I couldn’t stand up. [As a coping mechanism] I tried complaining and being bitter. It didn’t work. It was just terrible. . . . Stephen Hawking actually has the best quote on this and also [a] legitimate story. . . . [He] has the right to complain probably more than anybody. He says that, ‘When you complain, nobody wants to help you,’ and it’s the simplest thing and so plainly spoken. Only he could really say that brutal, honest truth, but it’s true, right?


Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Whereas Oxford has a solid record in educating political grandees, Cambridge’s reputation lies more in the technological sphere. Past names to have worked and studied here range from Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin to the discoverers of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick, and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. In some senses it’s the mother of English scientific ideas. And even though you may think all those medieval and neo-Gothic buildings look serious, Cambridge was where English humour was nurtured, producing John Cleese, Michael Palin and others of the Monty Python team. Founded in the 13th century, contemporary Cambridge is less touristy and more manageable than its competitor.


Frommer's London 2009 by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Edmond Halley, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal, young professional

Along with Oxford, Cambridge is one of Britain’s ancient seats of knowledge. In many ways their stories are similar. However, beyond its campus, Cambridge has a thriving, high-tech industry. And while Oxford concentrates on the arts, Cambridge has embraced the sciences. Both Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking are graduates, joined by luminaries in every field. There is much to explore in Cambridge, so give yourself time to wander. ESSENTIALS GETTING THERE Trains depart frequently from London’s Liverpool Street and King’s Cross stations, arriving an hour later. For inquiries, call & 0845/748-4950.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Those who think they are empirical in that fashion are deluding themselves. But all too often social science begins with an elegant theory and then searches for facts that will confirm it. This, hopefully, is not the approach I take. There is a perhaps apocryphal story, retold by the physicist Stephen Hawking, about a famous scientist who was giving a public lecture on cosmology when he was interrupted by an old lady at the back of the room who told him he was speaking rubbish, and that the universe was actually a flat disc balanced on the back of a turtle. The scientist thought he could shut her up by asking what the turtle was standing on.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

The earliest telescopes were regarded primarily as aids to reconnaissance—as terrestrial devices, meant to be turned toward the sea rather than the sky and to be used in the daytime rather than at night. Marketed to the Chiang Kai-sheks and Benito Mussolinis of their era, not to the Carl Sagans and Stephen Hawkings, the best of these instruments would have been the prized possession of only a select few senior officers. Until the 1630s and 1640s the lightweight, portable, two-lensed Galilean spyglass—the lens near the eye concave, the one nearer the object convex—had the market pretty much to itself. Though relatively small and fuzzy, its images at least arrived at the eye right side up.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

Borges chose a character set with only 25 members, which is enough for uppercase Spanish (with a blank, a comma, and a period as the only punctuation), but not for English. I chose the more commodious 100 to make room without any doubt for the upper- and lowercase letters and punctuation of all the Roman-alphabet languages. 3. Stephen Hawking (1988, p. 129) insists on putting it this way: "There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe." Denton (1985) provides the estimate of 1070 atoms in the observable universe.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

At a certain point, things become so complex we just don’t know what is going to happen. The numbers become so mind-boggling that they simply lose their meaning. We hit the “Singularity.” A SINGULAR SENSATION In astrophysics, a “singularity” is a state in which things become so radically different that the old rules break down and we know virtually nothing. Stephen Hawking, for example, describes black holes as singularities where “the laws of science and our ability to predict the future would break down.” The historic parallel to singularities is “paradigm shifts,” when some concept or new technology comes along that wipes out the old way of understanding things.


God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History by Stephen Hawking

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, Turing machine

GOD CREATED THE INTEGERS GOD CREATED THE INTEGERS THE MATHEMATICAL BREAKTHROUGHS THAT CHANGED HISTORY EDITED, WITH COMMENTARY, BY STEPHEN HAWKING RUNNING PRESS PHILADELPHIA • LONDON © 2007 by Stephen Hawking All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher. 987654321 Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing Library of Congress Control Number: 2007920542 ISBN-13978-0-7624-3272-1 Cover design by Bill Jones Interior design by Bill Jones and Aptara Inc.


pages: 1,280 words: 384,105

The Best of Best New SF by Gardner R. Dozois

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Columbine, congestion charging, dark matter, Doomsday Book, double helix, Extropian, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, three-masted sailing ship, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, zero-sum game

Here he gives us the thought-provoking story of a young boy faced with some very tough choices, the sort which turn a boy into a man – and which could also spell the doom of all life on Earth if he chooses wrong. But the best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future. – Stephen Hawking, “The Future of the Universe” I REMEMBER NOW HOW lonely I was when I met Cross. I never let anyone know about it, because being alone back then didn’t make me quite so unhappy. Besides, I was just a kid. I thought it was my own fault. It looked like I had friends. In 1962, I was on the swim team and got elected Assistant Patrol Leader of the Wolf Patrol in Boy Scout Troop 7.


Frommer's England 2011: With Wales by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, double helix, Edmond Halley, gentrification, George Santayana, haute couture, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, the market place, tontine, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Along with Oxford, Cambridge is one of Britain’s ancient seats of learning. In many ways, their stories are similar, particularly the age-old conflict between town and gown. Cambridge can name-drop with the best of them, citing alumni such as Isaac Newton, John Milton, and Virginia Woolf. Cambridge continues to graduate many famous scientists such as physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time. In the 1990s, Cambridge became known as a high-tech outpost, or a “silicon fen,” if you will. High-tech ventures continue to base themselves here—start-up companies produce £2 billion a year in revenues. Even Bill Gates, in 1997, financed an £80-million research center here, claiming that Cambridge was becoming a “world center of advanced technology.”