“The result confirmed the central contention in Gödel, Escher, Bach. Human intuition was not so magical after all. A machine could reproduce it with the trick of mapping one thing onto another” (147).
“AI experts had long recognized that tasks that humans perform instantly and unthinkingly, such as recognizing an image, are hard to program, because humans are not conscious of the steps taken to accomplish them: This is known as Moravec’s paradox” (195).
“Philosophically, Google’s innovation [Attention is All You Need] recalled an old insight about time, and how people relate to it. In the early 1900s, Henri Bergson, a French thinker so celebrated that fans stole locks of hair from his barber, debunked the idea of time as a simple linear progression. The proverbs might say that ‘time marches on’; that ‘time waits for no man’; and so forth. But this is not how time is actually experienced. Rather, humans spend many of their conscious moments contemplating yesterday or anticipating tomorrow, dwelling on what was and what might be even as they dwell in the present. What governs their experience, in other words, is not the inexorable ticking of the clock. It is their choice of where to focus their attention” (207).
“You have components, and they don’t have a certain property. And then somehow when you put these components together, the property emerges” (221).
“There are emergent properties wherever you look” (222).
Sebastian Mallaby, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind,
and the Quest for Superintelligence (2026)
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