Sublime

But an important feature of neural nets is that—like computers in general—they’re

Norbert Wiener, the grandfather of cybernetics, wrote that “we are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

He proved, and received the Nobel Prize for showing, that some systems can, in fact, develop in an upward spiral of ever-increasing complexity.

jail. No matter how advanced our technology may be, in other words, we can never escape from the normative and political task of deciding how to use it.

Systems work on probabilities. Understand them, don’t ignore them.

Wiener was as worldly as Shannon was reticent. He was well traveled and polyglot, ambitious and socially aware; he took science personally and passionately. His expression of the second law of thermodynamics, for example, was a cry of the heart: We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to

In other words—somewhat counterintuitively—it can be easier to solve more complicated problems with neural nets than simpler ones. And the rough reason for this seems to be that when one has a lot of “weight variables” one has a high-dimensional space with “lots of different directions” that can lead one to the minimum—whereas with fewer variables

Chaos theory is about limitations on predictability in classical physics,

Pierre de Fermat,