On not doing the impossible:
Ferrucci says. “We constantly underestimate—we did in the ’50s about AI, and we’re still doing it—what is really going on in the human brain.”
The question that [Douglas] Hofstadter wants to ask Ferrucci, and everybody else in mainstream AI, is this: Then why don’t you come study it?
...
Peter Norvig, one of Google’s directors of research, echoes Ferrucci almost exactly. “I thought he was tackling a really hard problem,” he told me about Hofstadter’s work. “And I guess I wanted to do an easier problem.”
Think big. Then think bigger than that. Don’t stop dreaming until you change the entire world. If you’re thinking about things that already exist, you’re doing it wrong. Never settle for good enough.
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are: