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“More broadly, formal logic of the sort we have been talking about does only one thing well: it allows us to take knowledge of which we are certain and apply rules that are always valid to deduce new knowledge of which we are also certain.”
― Gary F. Marcus, Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

“But the real story is how narrow Duplex was. For all the fantastic resources of Google (and its parent company, Alphabet), the system that they created was so narrow it could handle just three things: restaurant reservations, hair salon appointments, and the opening hours of a few selected businesses. By the time the demo was publicly released, on Android phones, even the hair salon appointments and the opening hour queries were gone. Some of the world’s best minds in AI, using some of the biggest clusters of computers in the world, had produced a special-purpose gadget for making nothing but restaurant reservations. It doesn’t get narrower than that.”
― Gary F. Marcus, Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

“Yet, the invasion was not one prong of a grand campaign on the part of the caliphate to conquer “Europe,” which was at that time a poor and underdeveloped backwater and did not figure at all in the Arabo-Islamic imagination.”
― Brian Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain

“In his own time, the Cid was a warrior of legendary stature among both Christians and Muslims of the peninsula, who praised or cursed him not according to their religious affiliation but according to whether he had appeared to them as a liberator or a scourge. This was a culture that glorified brutality in the pursuit of wealth and glory. Ballads extolling his feats, the medieval equivalent of today’s narco-corridas, which rhapsodize the exploits of modern frontier outlaws, were sung around countless campfires.”
― Brian Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain