Great book, summary: Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
• Inventor of theory of quantum computing in 1980s.
• Reviews science history (kinda long and boring =)
• Sees quantum superpositions and the Schrödinger equation as evidence for his many worlds quantum multiverse, where everything physically possible occurs in an infinite branching of alternate histories.
• Infinity = the enlightenment of the 18th century as near the beginning of an infinite sequence of purposeful knowledge creation by humankind
• Speculates on the process of human-culture development from a genetic basis through to a memetic emergence.
• Divides societies on more dynamic and more static (= better for innovations)
• The sustained creation of knowledge could have arisen anywhere and led to a beginning of infinity; it just happened to arise in Europe first.
• Extols the philosophical concept of optimism, where although problems are inevitable, solutions will always exist provided the right knowledge is sought out and acquired
• Book is 2011, he didn’t work with neural networks? =)
• The source of intelligence is more complicated than brute computational power. He points to the lack of progress in Turing test AI programs in the six decades since the Turing test was first proposed.
• What matters for knowledge creation is creativity. New ideas that provide good explanations for phenomena require outside-the-box thinking as the unknown is not easily predicted from past experience.
• In essence, he is anthropocentric and doesn’t believe in general AI at all =)
Human creativity:
• Evolved as a way to faithfully reproduce existing memes, as this would require creative intelligence to produce a refined rule set that would more faithfully reproduce the existing memes that happened to confer benefit (and all the other memes too).
• From this increased creative ability, the ability to create new memes emerged and humans thus became universal constructors and technological development accelerated.
Please remember neurobiological discovery I mentioned also — that the brain is always under random waves, kinda trying to make random connections on nervous system info and on memes in the memory.
