Susie Han

“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

“There are. Storytelling may be the mind’s way of rehearsing for the real world, a cerebral version of the playful activities documented across numerous species which provide a safe means for practicing and refining critical skills. Leading psychologist and all-around man of the mind Steven Pinker describes a particularly lean version of the idea: “Life is like chess, and plots are like those books of famous chess games that serious players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits.” Pinker imagines that through story we each build a “mental catalogue” of strategic responses to life’s potential curveballs, which we can then consult in moments of need. From fending off devious tribesmen to wooing potential mates, to organizing collective hunts, to avoiding poisonous plants, to instructing the young, to apportioning meager food supplies, and so on, our forebears faced one obstacle after another as their genes sought a presence in subsequent generations. Immersion in fictional tales grappling with a wide assortment of similar challenges would have had the capacity to refine our forebears’ strategies and responses. Coding the brain to engage with fiction would thus be a clever way to cheaply, safely, and efficiently give the mind a broader base of experience from which to operate.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“one of the essential insights gained by Turing as he observed his “children” was that if machines were ever to advance toward true intelligence, they would have to be fallible: they would need to be capable not only of error and of deviation from their original programming but also of random and even nonsensical behavior. Turing believed that such randomness would play an important part in intelligent machinery, because it allows for novel and unpredictable responses, creating a large variety of possibilities among which a search program could then find the appropriate action for each particular circumstance.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You