Epstein Secrets

mits on computational resources. The efficacy of human algorithms springs from what AI researchers refer to as “bounded optimality.” As psychologist Daniel Kahneman has notably pointed out, human beings are rational only up to a point. If you were perfectly rational, you would risk dropping dead before making an

ing a place to begin. New Technologies=New Perceptions Before AI, there was Cybernetics—the idea of automatic, self-regulating control, laid out in Norbert Wiener’s foundational text of 1948. I can date my own serious exposure to it to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four or five other young arts

xperiments like John Searle’s Chinese Room and Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics all appeal to the sorts of intuitions plaguing human brains that Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others have demonstrated. The Chinese Room experiment posits that a mind composed of mechanical and Homo sapiens parts cannot be c

agic or mysticism of an earlier age— as by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extraordinarily prescient. Wiener, the M

mits on computational resources. The efficacy of human algorithms springs from what AI researchers refer to as “bounded optimality.” As psychologist Daniel Kahneman has notably pointed out, human beings are rational only up to a point. If you were perfectly rational, you would risk dropping dead before making an

ing a place to begin. New Technologies=New Perceptions Before AI, there was Cybernetics—the idea of automatic, self-regulating control, laid out in Norbert Wiener’s foundational text of 1948. I can date my own serious exposure to it to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four or five other young arts

xperiments like John Searle’s Chinese Room and Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics all appeal to the sorts of intuitions plaguing human brains that Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others have demonstrated. The Chinese Room experiment posits that a mind composed of mechanical and Homo sapiens parts cannot be c

agic or mysticism of an earlier age— as by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extraordinarily prescient. Wiener, the M