
“No one wants to die; everyone wants to fly everywhere in the universe. Young men, especially, get high on infinity; their version of tech culture is the most influential culture of our time. It is the only remaining cultural force that can defy market forces, technological limitations, and the law—at least for a while […]
But our best understanding of how reality works is entirely bound to finitude. Physics is all about conservation principles. There are no infinities, only S curves. There is no free lunch. Technical culture often longs for freedom from finitude. A profound truth, however, is that the greatest mysteries are found in conserved systems, which can become rich and complex, not in infinite ones, which stretch out like blank white sheets to the edge of the cosmos.”
“You could do much better at automating music—at making say, new Mozart if you didn’t insist that they were like the old ones. If Mozart were alive his next great work would not be in the space that an AI can synthesize from all his existing works. It would be new in a creative way. So: make a computer program that conjectures what the problem situation is—What is it that Mozart was trying to do? Why is it that he has this amazing ability to make a tune that meshes with all sorts of other considerations and that ends up working?”
“The sound is how you feel about yourself.”

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