Sublime

AN EMERGING SCIENCE

that people—or, if you like, automata, algorithms—can and do act in situations that are not well defined.

The most profound problem facing survivors is that human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population.

Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

In some sense, scientific inquiry is thus an effort to become inhuman. Or perhaps nonhuman. Or perhaps superhuman.

The discovery cut through the heart of the controversy.

The new computer was assigned two problems: how to destroy life as we know it, and how to create life of unknown forms.

Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions.