Andy Cuomo > Andy's Quotes

“The present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more dreadful. Literally and figuratively, we are running out of room. At long last, we begin to feel the effects of the finite, actual size of the Earth in a critical way. This is the maturing crisis of technology. In the years between now and the beginning of the next century, the global crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say. It is a very small comfort to think that the interests of humanity might one day change, the present curiosity in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind. Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other. It is a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider. However, it seems that the ever-accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity, a tipping point in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them cannot continue. Progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated. Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement, and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“He was almost consumed by his passion for logic, and during his entire life, that strange gift of his let him see things with remarkable clarity, granting him a vision so blinding that to others, whose focus is smeared by emotional considerations and prejudices, his point of view seemed completely incomprehensible.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“With the creation of the atom bomb physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” That’s what Oppenheimer said.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Gödel had shown him that if someone succeeded in creating a formal system of axioms that was free of all internal paradoxes and contradictions, it would always be incomplete, because it would contain truths and statements that—while being undeniably true—could never be proven within the laws of that system.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“The philosophical implications of Gödel’s logic were astonishing, and his incompleteness theorems, as they later came to be known, are now considered a fundamental discovery, one that hints at the limits of human understanding.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will - millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space - unleash something comparable to the singularity?”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“He lamented the attitude of his younger students, who “no longer noticed that their heads had been turned into relays in a telephone network for communicating and distributing sensational physics messages” without realizing that, like almost all modern developments, mathematics was hostile to life: “It is inhuman, like every truly diabolic machine, and it kills everyone whose spinal marrow isn’t conditioned to fit the movement of its wheels.” His already excruciating self-criticism and inferiority complex became truly unbearable, for although he knew mathematics, it was not simple for him. He was not a computer.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The Maniac

“We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“For Heisenberg, it was no longer possible to speak of any subatomic phenomenon with absolute certainty. Where before there had been a cause for every effect, now there was a spectrum of probabilities.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will--millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space--unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible but was actually taking place. . . . He babbled about a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world, and he lamented that there was nothing we could do about it. Because the singularity sent out no warnings. The point of no return--the limit past which one fell prey to its unforgiving pull--had no sign or demarcation. Whoever crossed it was beyond hope. Their destiny was set, as all possible trajectories led irrevocably to the singularity. And if such was the nature of that threshold, Schwarzschild asked, his eyes shot through with blood, how would we know if we had already crossed it?”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Lost faith is worse than no faith at all, because it leaves behind a gaping hole, much like the hollow that the Spirit left when it abandoned this accursed world. But by their very nature, those god-shaped voids demand to be filled with something as precious as that which was lost. The choice of that something—if indeed it is a choice at all—rules the destiny of men.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“In 1907, Haber was the first to obtain nitrogen, the main nutrient required for plant growth, directly from the air. In this way, from one day to the next, he addressed the scarcity of fertilizer that threatened to unleash an unprecedented global famine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Had it not been for Haber, hundreds of millions of people who until then had depended on natural fertilizers such as guano and saltpetre for their crops would have died from lack of nourishment. In prior centuries, Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths. The English tomb raiders had exhausted the reserves in continental Europe; they dug up more than three million human skeletons, along with the bones of hundreds of thousands of dead horses that soldiers had ridden in the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, sending them by ship to the port of Hull in the north of England, where they were ground in the bone mills of Yorkshire to fertilize the verdant fields of Albion.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“The combination of those two systems—honed and perfected during millions and millions of games of self-play—is what allowed AlphaGo to range far beyond human knowledge and come up with radical strategies and counterintuitive moves like the one that it had flaunted during the second game against Lee Sedol. They also allowed it to have a precise estimate of how unlikely that particular move would seem to its human opponent.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Significant phrases, witty points and dialectic are all at his disposal in an extraordinary manner. He knows how to make the most difficult things concrete and intuitively clear.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Did you know the first symptom of a psychological disturbance is the inability to contend with the future?”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“we don’t know what comes after evil, do we? And sometimes the deadliest things, those that hold enough power to destroy us, can become, given time, the instruments of our salvation.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years. Today, nearly fifty per cent of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies are artificially created, and more than half the world population depends on foodstuffs fertilized thanks to Haber’s invention.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“With his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, for example, he wasn’t trying to fight a war, or beat the casino, or finally win a game of poker; he was aiming at nothing less than the complete mathematization of human motivation,”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“when discussing atoms, language could serve as nothing more than a kind of poetry.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“physicist—like the poet—should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“They said that he had learned to read by age two. That he was fluent in Latin, Ancient Greek, German, English, and French, that he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head by the time he was six,”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“it was impossible to “see” a quantum entity for the simple reason that it did not have a single identity. Illuminating one of its properties necessarily obscured the other. The best description of a quantum system was neither an image nor a metaphor, but rather a set of numbers.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised. According to the determinists, if one could reveal the laws that governed matter, one could reach back to the most archaic past and predict the most distant future. If everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state, then merely by looking at the present and running the equations it would be possible to achieve a godlike knowledge of the universe. Those hopes were shattered in light of Heisenberg’s discovery: what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“he was incapable of concentrating; one thought ran into the next, and he had the sense that the tedium of war was spawning a long-dormant psychosis in him.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Reality, they said to those present, does not exist as something separate from the act of observation.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“he wanted to create a new mind, a smarter, faster, stranger one than any we had known. AGI: artificial general intelligence. The true son of man.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC