It was my turn to pick the book for book club this month and I picked The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. CoS is the follow up to iRobot and really leans into the tension between humans and robots as robots continue to take people’s jobs. Even though the book was written in 1953, the discourse in the book is more relevant than ever. This article about the mathematically “proven” limitations in AI (TL;DR AI is good for simple problems but unstable over time for anything more complex) reminded me of this quote from The Caves of Steel:

“There’s no way we can raise a positronic brain one inch above the level of perfect materialism. We can’t, damn it, we can’t. Not as long as we don’t understand what makes our own brains tick. Not as long as things exist that science can’t measure. What is beauty, or goodness, or art, or love, or God? We’re forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood. It’s what makes us men.”