The Knowledge Trap Ignoring the multitudes that are giddy with joy as they discover the thrill of interacting with all the GPTs and getting intelligent and coherent responses, there are the handfuls of us who are lamenting how AI is going to whip our asses (and the rest of the bodies connected to those asses).…

We’d Lose This chapter starts with a very short prologue – the only non-fiction – of an aztec warrior watching a spanish armada showing up on it shore, and having not even the faintest idea that the men on these boats carry magic sticks that they can point at you from a distance, and you…

Its Favorite Things Another interesting story about a biological bird-like species living in nests that happens to develop a quirk which accidentally gets more and more widely propagated till there only remain birds who have that trait. Like the aliens from the previous chapter’s hypothetical story, there’s a boy-bird and girl-bird discussing what other species…

You don’t get what you train for The authors start with yet another illustrative hypothetical of 2 aliens observing the early days of our race, and arguing about how humans might evolve, one of them using existing data to predict that humans will evolve extremely slowly, and only in the direction of reproduction and food,…

Learning to Want The chapter starts with another “parable”, if you will; if a machine is taught to play chess to win every time, does it want to win? Or is it just programmed to do so? Is there a difference? Do humans actually want something they pursue? Or is it their genetics and nurture…

Grown, Not Crafted This was a very important chapter and concept from my perspective. Again, starts with a brilliant hypothetical situation about a woman wondering if she could beat both her genes and those of her husband and create a baby that’s happy and doesn’t turn out to be a terrible human being, and a…