Words&Dirt

“There’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never.”

––The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, pg. 325

“Whether computing technologies are deployed to extend human capabilities or to replace them is more a consequence of the particular economic system in which they are created and used than anything inherent in the technologies themselves. In a capitalist economy, if artificial intelligence technologies improve to the point that they can replace new kinds of white-collar and professional workers, they will inevitably be used in that way. That lesson carries forward in the differing approaches of the software engineers, AI researchers, roboticists, and hackers who are the designers of these future systems. It should be obvious that Bill Joy’s warning that ‘the future doesn’t need us’ is just one possible outcome. It is equally apparent that the world transformed by these technologies doesn’t have to play out catastrophically.”

––Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, by John Markoff, pg. 342-3