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.

inventing, for example, imaginary video games and painting screen shots from them.

As in the physics example, if we want to build an AI to work with human behavior, then we need to build the statistical properties of human networks into machine-learning algorithms. When you replace the stupid neurons with ones that capture the basics of human behavior, then you can identify trends with very little data,

This problem requires a change in the definition of AI itself—from a field concerned with pure intelligence, independent of the objective, to a field concerned with systems that are provably beneficial for humans.

AI possible suggest that the current mania is a phase that will pass, to be followed by something even more significant: the merging of artificial and natural intelligence.

next step is to try to do the same thing but at scale, something I refer to as building a trust network for data. It can be thought of as a distributed system like the Internet, but with the ability to quantitatively measure and communicate the qualities of human society, in the same way that the U.S. census does a pretty good job of telling us

“[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.”

The artist Paul Klee often talked about art as “making the invisible visible.”

If information was like entropy, then it could not be conserved—or contained.