barbara cathalinat

“widely distributed on continents and “continental islands” like Great Britain that were once connected to major landmasses. It is these facts that helped Darwin concoct the”
― Jerry A. Coyne, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

“Moore’s law means computers will get smaller, more powerful, and cheaper at a reliable rate. This does not happen because Moore’s law is a natural law of the physical world, like gravity, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It happens because the consumer and business markets motivate computer chip makers to compete and contribute to smaller, faster, cheaper computers, smart phones, cameras, printers, solar arrays, and soon, 3-D printers. And chip makers are building on the technologies and techniques of the past. In 1971, 2,300 transistors could be printed on a chip. Forty years, or twenty doublings later, 2,600,000,000. And with those transistors, more than two million of which could fit on the period at the end of this sentence, came increased speed.”
― James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

“Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing computer, was a sole entity, and not a team of self-improving ASIs, but the feeling of going up against it is instructive. Two grandmasters said the same thing: “It’s like a wall coming at you.” IBM’s Jeopardy! champion, Watson, was a team of AIs—to answer every question it performed this AI force multiplier trick, conducting searches in parallel before assigning a probability to each answer.”
― James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

“Like genetic algorithms, ANNs are “black box” systems. That is, the inputs—the network weights and neuron activations—are transparent. And what they output is understandable. But what happens in between? Nobody understands. The output of “black box” artificial intelligence tools can’t ever be predicted. So they can never be truly and verifiably “safe.”
― James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era