Sublime

The utopians see the dawn of AGI and subsequent singularity as the final frontier in human flourishing, an opportunity to expand our own consciousness and conquer mortality. Ray Kurzweil—the eccentric inventor, futurist, and guru-in-residence at Google—envisions a radical future in which humans and machines have fully merged. We will upload our min

En sa qualité de mathématicien, Dyson se qualifiait lui-même de grenouille, mais il reconnaissait qu’il était « stupide de dire que les oiseaux sont meilleurs que les grenouilles parce qu’ils voient plus loin ou que les grenouilles sont supérieures aux oiseaux parce qu’elles voient plus profond ». Le monde est à la fois vaste et profond. « Nous avo

Today, a young theoretical astrophysicist is more likely to get a tenure-track job by pondering multiverses than by seeking evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This is a shame, especially because budding scientists are often at their most imaginative during the early phases of their careers. During this fertile period, they encounter a profe

whatchamagoogle…

If their society made some mistaken decision, which led to disaster, they can warn us of it.

An internationally renowned scientist (whom you will meet toward the end of this book) told me that increasing specialization has created a “system of parallel trenches” in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happ

The physicist Robert Forward wrote a superb science-fiction story, Dragon’s Egg, based on the premise that information could be stored and processed – and life and intelligence could evolve – through the interactions between neutrons on the surface of a neutron star (a star that has collapsed gravitationally to a diameter of only a few kilometres,

EVER-SMARTER COMPUTERS: FRIEND OR FOE?

McClintock, Prusiner, and Marshall offered projective thinking, suspending their disbelief regarding scientific views accepted at the time.