Epstein Secrets

ax Tegmark, Frank Wilczek, and Stephen Wolfram. Stewart Brand, in his jacket blurb, nicely frames the pro

ver the sessions and decided who to invite and what they should talk about. von Foerster, as Secretary, was the driving force of the project. It was McCulloch who insisted over Norbert Wiener's objections that "mind" be introduced into the mix, and for this, he recruited Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.

when I see it” (U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, 1964) or the “wisdom of repugnance” (aka “yuck f

It’s fun to show it an abstract painting and see what it says. But it does a pretty good job. It works using the same neural-network technology that McCulloch and Pitts imagined in 1943 and lots of us worked on in the early eighties. Back in the 1980s, people successfully did OCR—optical character recogniti

when I see it” (U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, 1964) or the “wisdom of repugnance” (aka “yuck f

It’s fun to show it an abstract painting and see what it says. But it does a pretty good job. It works using the same neural-network technology that McCulloch and Pitts imagined in 1943 and lots of us worked on in the early eighties. Back in the 1980s, people successfully did OCR—optical character recogniti

eparing the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog for publication. While Lois and the team did the heavy lifting on the final mechanicals for WEC, Stewart and I sat together in a corner for two days, reading, underlining, and annotating the same paperback copy of Cybernetics that Cage had handed to me t

t its consequences are intimately bound up in the idea of an impending technological singularity. His work on neuroscience and his initial support of McCulloch and Pitts adumbrated the startlingly effective deep-learning methods of the present day. Over the past decade, and particularly in the last five year

eparing the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog for publication. While Lois and the team did the heavy lifting on the final mechanicals for WEC, Stewart and I sat together in a corner for two days, reading, underlining, and annotating the same paperback copy of Cybernetics that Cage had handed to me t

t its consequences are intimately bound up in the idea of an impending technological singularity. His work on neuroscience and his initial support of McCulloch and Pitts adumbrated the startlingly effective deep-learning methods of the present day. Over the past decade, and particularly in the last five year