Max

“When considering automation, therefore, it is wrong to compare the abilities of a single human driver to that of a single self-driving car, or of a single human doctor to that of a single AI doctor. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Children acquire spoken language instinctively but written language only by the sweat of their brow, because spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens or hundreds of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow-spreading invention.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“The arrival of the virus was like an examination of state capacity. A handful of Western countries passed. Germany was an outstanding performer in Europe, while Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, and, surprisingly, Greece did well. New Zealand and Australia were champions on the Pacific rim. But most Western countries, particularly America and Britain, failed the test, humiliatingly so when compared with countries in Asia.”
― John Micklethwait, The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It

“We concoct neologisms (quark, meme, clone, deep structure), invent slang (to spam, to diss, to flame, to surf the web, a spin doctor), borrow useful words from other languages (joie de vivre, schlemiel, angst, machismo), or coin new metaphors (waste time, vote with your feet, push the outside of the envelope).”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature