The genetic system in every living cell is a stored-program computer. Brains aren’t.

let it pull out the salient features. Instead, Lake et al. gave the program a general model of how you draw a character: A stroke goes either right or left; after you finish one, you start another; and so on. When the program saw a particular character, it could infer the sequence of strokes that were most likely to have led to it—just as I inferre

We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.*

formulation, the information content of a string of symbols was given by the logarithm of the number of possible symbols from which a given string was chosen.

that the ability to transmit energy as electricity caused a second industrial revolution. Now the source of energy could be distant from where it was used,

What the intent-prediction approach misses is that the moment the robot acts, that influences what actions the human starts taking.

“[T]he fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold”; most people, he observed, “cannot conceive of a piece of information without an owner.”

Whatever actions the robot decides on need to mesh well with ours. This is the coordination problem.

They are, as Wiener says, helpless, not in the sense of being shackled agents or disabled agents but in the sense of not being agents at all—not having the capacity to be “moved by reasons” (as Kant put it) presented to them. It is important that we keep it that way, which will take some doing.