Michael > Recent Status Updates

“Guivi was thirty-seven. He had a moment on the screen that would never be forgotten. Tinted posters of him would peel from the sides of buildings more and more remote, the resemblance fading, his name becoming stale. He would smile across alleys, into the sour darkness. Far-off dogs were barking. The streets smelled of the poor.”

Exponentially improving information technology is a rising tide that lifts all the boats of the human condition. And we are now about to enter the period when this tide surges upward as never before. The key to this is artificial intelligence, which is now allowing us to turn many kinds of linearly advancing tech into exponential information technology—from agriculture and medicine to manufacturing and land use.

“What you should take away from all this is that even wildly altering our assumptions does not change the essential message of the forecast: computers will be able to simulate human brains in all the ways we might care about within the next two decades or so.”

“For me as a human being, Nagarjuna teaches the serenity, the lightness and the shining beauty of the world: we are nothing but images of images. Reality, including our selves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which… there is nothing.”

“These are the most exciting and momentous years in all of history. We cannot say with confidence what life will be like after the Singularity. But by understanding and anticipating the transitions leading up to it, we can help ensure that humanity’s final approach will be safe and successful.”

“Contextuality is the technical name that denotes this central aspect[.] An isolated object, taken in itself, independent of every interaction, has no particular state. At most we can attribute to it a kind of probabilistic disposition to manifest iself in one way or another. But even this is only an anticipation of future phenomena, a reflection of phenomena past, and only and always relative to another object.”

“Malcolm believes in Malraux and Max Weber: art is the real history of nations. In the details of his person there is evidence of a process not fully complete. It is the making of a man into a true instrument. He is preparing for the arrival of that great artist he one day expects to be, an artist in the truly modern sense which is to say without accomplishments but with the conviction of genius.”

“Malcolm believes in Malraux and Max Weber: art is the real history of nations. In the details of his person there is evidence of a process not fully complete. It is the making of a man into a true instrument. He is preparing for the arrival of the great artist he one day expects to be, an artist in the truly modern sense which is to say without accomplishments but with the conviction of genius.”

“Now Mother no longer had any money. She had spent it all on us, on Naoji and myself, without begrudging us a penny, and she was being forced to leave the house where she had passed so many years to enter on a life of misery in a cottage without a single servant […] For the first time in my life I realized what a horrible, miserable, salvationless hell it is to be without money.”

“…[R]e-encountering someone you loved once and realizing that the effort of forgetting, condemning and turning bitter has had very little effect. But are you falling in love with the person or are you falling for the past, your own passage in time, and the mere idea of love? When you look at an old movie do you really re-examine it…? [O]r are you falling in line with a version of yourself and your pleasure?”

“Dietrich was never really a great actress. When asked to act she lost confidence. If told to exist she became a lighthouse summoning every sailor to her rocks. So truly the moment is weightier than the film and more enduring. But these days people like to take their films in bits and pieces — video allowed that — so one day it may be that no one makes full movies any longer, just arresting moments.”

“Do you remember the movies you saw, like whole vessels serene on the seas of time? Or do you just retain moments from them, […] Most people, I find, remember moments from films they saw as children or adolescents(so true film buffs like to extend those stages of life). Yet often the moment has overwhelmed the film itself.”

“At ten, a democrat; at twenty, a communist; at thirty, a pure aesthete; at forty, a conservative.”

“The claim that between 1941 and 1944 Belgrade was the ‘unhappiest city in Europe’ is perhaps not altogether valid, but it is true that it was a scene of unparalleled evil and baseness and, at the same time, of greatness as well as of acute suffering. Of all this the house on Tolstoy Street had its share.”

“The only thing left to him of his youth was his reading habit. But even his reading had been, for a long time now, confused and accidental. Like many people who read books primarily in search of comfort and oblivion, he grew selective, and only with difficulty found literature that could remove him from his real life.”

“In the ‘kasaba,’ where men and women resemble one another like sheep, it happens sometimes that chance will bring a child, as the wind brings seeds, who is depraved and stands out from the usual order of things, causing ill-luck and confusion, until it is cut down itself and the old order re-established.”

“So the ‘charshiya’ lives in anticipation of fresh news and reliable information. The people suffer, whisper, protect themselves, and if they cannot do it any other way, they do it through stories in which their unclear and indestructible desire for justice is perpetuated, for a different life and better times.”

“…[T]his is the age of an anonymous public blurting out opinions. The leaders only lose their minds and run around in confusion. In this situation, it is clear that the public is being abandoned. A general election is approaching, but all we hear are weird speeches that result in the public increasingly making fun of the representatives.”

“The smile of one flower permeates those who live next to death more than the problem of life and death […] I’ve come to feel that living or dying is not the key that determines a person’s happiness or sorrow. The dead are complete, and the living stand on the deck of the ship about to set sail with their hands together. The ship glides away from the pier.”

“Last evening, while the two of us were drinking, I turned to my uncle and asked in jest, ‘Define life for me — in just a word or two.’
‘I don’t know about life,’ he replied, ‘but the world’s nothing but sex and greed.’”

“You suffer because you think the only life you can have is in the place you were born. ‘Green hills are where you find them’ — isn’t that a line from a poem you scholars are always quoting?”

“The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.”