“‘Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,’ said May Kasahara. ‘Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of […]
“‘Why do you like jellyfish so much?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know. I guess I think they’re cute,’ she said. ‘But one thing did occur to me when I was really focused on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This […]
“Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have […]
“It was a narrow world, a world that was standing still. But the narrower it become, and the more it betook of stillness, the more this world that enveloped me seemed to overflow with things and people that could only be called strange. They had been there all the while, it seemed, waiting in the […]
“The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless.” ––The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 79 “Starting from rudimentary replicators, evolution produced increasingly ‘advanced’ organisms, including creatures with minds, consciousness, language, and reason. More recently, cultural and technological processes, which bear some loose similarities to […]
“Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history––his home––the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, […]
“When he saw Tommy step out onto the tallest rooftop in the city, wearing a small, horrified smile, Joe felt the passionate, if not the factual, truth behind Kornblum’s dictum. He had returned to New York years before, with the intention of finding a way to reconnect, if possible, with the only family that remained […]
“A great fire can put out a smaller one by starving it of oxygen and fuel. Now, as he returned the last letter to the packet, he was almost sick with longing for Mrs. Rosa Clay of Van Pelt Street, Midwood, Brooklyn. Sammy had once told him about the capsule that had been buried at […]
“In some domains, quantity is a poor substitute for quality. One solitary genius working out of a cork-lined bedroom can write In Search of Lost Time. Could an equivalent masterpiece be produced by recruiting an office building full of literary hacks? Even within the range of present human variation we see that some functions benefit […]
“It made his heart ache to look around the vast expanse of the fairground that, not very long ago, had swarmed with flags and women’s hats and people being whizzed around in jitneys, and see only a vista of mud and tarpaulins and blowing newspaper, broken up here and there by the spindly stump of […]