This Will Make You Smarter

Humans, and essentially all the animals you know and love, typically harness a couple thousand kilojoules per mole by burning food with oxygen.

Supervenience is a shorthand abstraction, native to Anglo-American philosophy, that provides a general framework for thinking about how everything relates to everything else.

For that, we must look for and invest in quantum jumps in technology with low probability of success; we must create black-swan technologies. We must enable the multiplication of resources

Focusing on short-term, incremental solutions will only distract us from working on producing the home runs that could change the assumptions regarding energy and society’s resources.

his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb defines a black swan as an event of low probability, extreme impact, and only retrospective predictability.

They included too few subjects, they were not randomized, they did not properly compare the orders with alternatives, and judges were not even asked to record how they would otherwise have sentenced offenders. The culture of public service

but now we tend to think more in terms of fertile circumstances, wherein uncountable numbers of minds contribute to a river of innovation.

Having been fed personal data provided by users themselves or gathered by third parties, the technology would then analyze it to “enable identification of opportunities and/or provisioning of recommendations to increase user productivity and/or improve quality of life.”

The challenge for a distributed system is to achieve this illusion of a single unified behavior in the face of so much underlying complexity.