Emmanuel Maggiori > Quotes

“The epidemic of tech unproductivity doesn’t just affect tech; it affects a lot of people who have little to do with it. One reason for this is that high-paid, idle techies have a lot of free time and money to spend on all sorts of stuff, from soy lattes to houses, which shapes the wider economy. Moreover, if you remember, a lot of the money which funds tech is other people’s money, as pension funds, universities, and governments channel money toward venture capital, which then goes to tech. Perhaps some of your savings fund tech’s unproductivity.”
― Emmanuel Maggiori, Siliconned: How the tech industry solves fake problems, hoards idle workers, and makes doomed bets with other people's money

“This debate is important for analyzing the future of AI. The idea that our minds are computers is the ultimate argument supporting that artificial general intelligence is possible; all it takes is to scan a brain and use it as a template to build an equivalent computer. Philosopher Nick Bostrom writes, “The availability of the brain as template provides strong support for the claim that machine intelligence is ultimately feasible […] Intelligent software would be produced by scanning and closely modeling the computational structure of a biological brain.”78 So, according to this argument, since our minds are just computers, it is, in principle, possible to someday build computers that can do anything a human can do (but it could take a while).”
― Emmanuel Maggiori, Smart Until It's Dumb: Why artificial intelligence keeps making epic mistakes⁠—and why the AI bubble will burst