Words&Dirt

“A gentleman could not do magic. Magic was what street sorcerers pretended to do in order to rob children of their pennies. Magic (in the practical sense) was much fallen off. It had low connexions. It was the bosom companion of unshaven faces, gypsies, house-breakers, the frequenter of dingy rooms with dirty yellow curtains. Oh no! A gentleman could not do magic. A gentleman might study the history of magic (nothing could be nobler) but he could not do any. The elderly gentleman looked with faint, fatherly eyes at Mr Segundus and said that he hoped Mr Segundus had not been trying to cast spells.

Mr Segundus blushed.”

––Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, pg. 4-5

“I had asked Eliezer Yudkowsky if intelligence could emerge from the exponentially growing hardware of the Internet, from its five trillion megabytes of data, its more than seven billion connected computers and smart phones, and its seventy-five million servers. Yudkowsky had grimaced, as if his brain cells had been flooded by an acid bath of dumb.

‘Flatly, no,’ he said. ‘It took billions of years for evolution to cough up intelligence. Intelligence is not emergent in the complexity of life. It doesn’t happen automatically. There is optimization pressure with natural selection.’”

––Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, by James Barrat, pg. 124