The atomic human, p.43
The Atomic Human, page 43
3 The appointment lasted for only six weeks; Napoleon complained in his memoir that Laplace didn’t see the subtleties of administration, and Laplace was replaced with Napoleon’s brother. Perhaps the familial relationship of his replacement is a better explanation for the replacement than Laplace’s administration skills.
4 Pierre-Simon Laplace, Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (1814), translated as A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, 1902, p. 4.
5 Matthew Boulton, letter to James Watt, 28 May 1788, The Library of Birmingham: Birmingham Archives and Heritage, Boulton & Watt Collection, MS 3147/3/12.
6 This engine, Boulton and Watt’s Tyger, known as the Lap Engine, was an engine powered by steam and controlled by the fly-ball governor. It is the oldest Watt engine to survive and can be seen at the London Science Museum.
7 Elon Musk, quoted from the Code Conference 2016; https://www.youtube.com/embed/wsixsRI-Sz4?start=4678
8 In the United States, Benjamin Franklin is famous for his interest in electricity. Some of Franklin’s experiments were conducted with Matthew Boulton during visits to England in 1758 and 1760. The members of the Lunar Society were socially liberal, making them kindred political spirits to Franklin and the Founding Fathers of the US.
9 Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984), p. 20.
10 My colleagues Timnit Gebru, Meg Mitchell and Emily Bender refer to the chatbot version of these models as stochastic parrots in acknowledgment of this. See E. M. Bender et al. (2021), ‘On the dangers of stochastic parrots: can language models be too big? ’, Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ‘21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 610–23; https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
11 N. Wiener, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1953), p. 194.
12 Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead. Principia Mathematica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910, 1912, 1913)
13 Bertrand Russell, quoting G. H. Hardy in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell on 2 May 1912. Letter held in the Bertrand Russell Collection at McMaster University. Document no. 000435 Box no. 2.58.
14 The new word is just a contraction of the words Not and And.
15 Dermot Turing, quoting Tommy Flowers in an interview with Brian Randell in 1975 in Prof: Alan Turing Decoded (Stroud: The History Press, 2015), p. 176.
16 ‘General Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Churchill review 101st Airborne Division troops in England during World War II.’ Video clip 65675076988 from Critical Past. See https://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675076988_101st-Airborne-Division_Dwight-Eisenhower_Winston-Churchill_Maxwell-D-Taylor
17 Note from General Dwight Eisenhower, evening of 5 June 1944, Eisenhower’s Pre-Presidential Papers, Principal File, Box 168, Butcher Diary June 28–July 14, 1944 (2); NAID #186470
6. The Gremlin of Uncertainty
1 Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time: From Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1988), Chapter 12.
2 Tetris is a computer game where the objective is to build a wall by dropping blocks so that they intersect with each other.
3 https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Main_Page
4 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan, 1979), Chapter 27.
5 Ibid., Chapter 28.
6 A. A. Milne as Winnie-the-Pooh in The House at Pooh Corner (1928), Chapter 6.
7 Oral history interview with Rommel’s son Manfred, from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Accession Number: 2017.295.20 | RG Number: RG-50.957.0019 available from https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn562437
8 Pierre-Simon Laplace, Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, 1814, translated as A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1902) p. 6.
9 Ibid., p. 6.
10 Sources for Cavallo’s career as described here include the NASA Headquarters NACA Oral History Project. Edited Oral History Transcript Stefan A. Cavallo interviewed by Sandra Johnson, 30 Sept. 2005, https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/oral_histories/NACA/CavalloSA_9-30-05.htm, and ’Parishioner Spotlight’ on Cavallo from St Francis de Sales Church, NYC, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST4dPqniBA, and an interview with Cavallo by his son from 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S_QousMTW8.
11 Donald S. Lopez Sr, Deputy Director of the US National Air and Space Museum and Second World War P-40 and P-51 pilot, speaking while introducing Cavallo at the National Air and Space Museum; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYL_l18J1-s
12 Stefan Cavallo, Bailout, available from https://stefancavallo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Bailout-Final-Version.pdf
13 Donald S. Lopez, Into the Teeth of the Tiger (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1997), p. 9.
14 Richard Price in the introduction to Thomas Bayes’s ‘An essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances’, 1763, p. 374.
15 Ibid., p. 374.
16 If you did study them directly from the Principia, then please do get in touch; I would love to hear your story. But even if you didn’t study them directly from the Principia, you studied the laws that came from there.
17 See p. 21 of ‘An interview with John Pinkerton’, 23 Aug. 1988, where Pinkerton states, ‘It was true that since 1951 a small job had been run regularly. This was a bakery sales analysis; originally it ran extremely slowly when we had a single teleprinter for output.’ Available from https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107600/oh149 jmp.pdf
18 Socrates quoted in Plato’s Apology, (c. 399 bce), trans. Henry Cary, in Plato’s Apology, Crito and Phaedo of Socrates (New York: Arthur Hinds & Company, 1892).
7. It’s Not Rocket Science or Brain Surgery
1 The first hominid in space was not a human but a chimpanzee named Ham. He was used to test the survival systems of the Mercury capsule. Yuri Gagarin became the second hominid to reach space when he launched ten weeks later. See also Christopher Kraft, Flight: My Life in Mission Control (Boston, MA: E. P. Dutton, 2001), p. 92. Kraft documents the origin of the expression ‘Spam in a can’ as coming from the Society of Experimental Test Pilots.
2 Donald S. Lopez, Into the Teeth of the Tiger (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1997), p. 43.
3 Robert R. Gilruth, ‘Requirements for satisfactory flying qualities of airplanes’, NACA Report NACA-TR-755, 1 Jan. 1943.
4 After the war Cavallo was asked, like Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, to go to Muroc air base to fly the X1. But as a father to a young family, with his parents running a furniture business in New York, he turned down the opportunity and headed back home to help in his parents’ business.
5 The term ‘unknown unknowns’ is often credited to Donald Rumsfeld from a press conference in February 2002. But Kraft’s use of it predates Rumsfeld’s: his autobiography was published in 2001.
6 Christopher Kraft, Flight: My Life in Mission Control (Boston, MA: E. P. Dutton, 2001), pp. 92–3.
7 Ibid., p. 102.
8 Amelia Earhart, The Fun of It: Random Records of My Own Flying and of Women in Aviation (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932).
9 David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge: Mass MIT, 2011), p. 222.
10 This notion is explored by Tor Nørretranders in Mærk verden (1991), published in English as The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, trans. J. Sydenham (New York: Viking, 1998).
11 Although a humorous study in the British Medical Journal on these professions found no significant differences between them and the wider human population. See I. Usher et al. (2021), ‘“It’s not rocket science” and “It’s not brain surgery” – “It’s a walk in the park”’ : prospective comparative study BMJ 2021; 375 :e067883 doi:10.1136/bmj-2021-067883
12 For a video see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j6OsP7zL6w
8. System Zero
1 W. Youyou, M. Kosinski and D. Stillwell (2015), ‘Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112 (4): 1036–40.
2 Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016).
3 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019).
4 See e.g. https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/lies.htm
5 Expert Scientific Group on Phase One Clinical Trials, 30 Nov. 2006 available from https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20130107105354/http://www.dh.gov.uk/prod_consum_dh/groups/dh_digitalassets/@dh/@en/documents/digitalasset/dh_073165.pdf
6 Donald M. MacKay and Valerie MacKay, Behind the Eye (The 1986 Gifford Lectures) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 40.
7 Ibid, p. 40.
8 Ibid
9 J. Kevin O’Regan, Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Conciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
10 Of course, this analogy is very unfair on chimps, who are extremely sophisticated social creatures with a mental capacity that is far beyond anything we are close to creating today.
11 J. Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
9. A Design for a Brain
1 A. M. Turing (1950), ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, Mind 49: 433–60.
2 Although the Wi-Fi human doesn’t exist, brain–computer interfaces are an active area of research. The field is long established but came to popular attention when Elon Musk’s company Neuralink was set up.
3 For the full results see https://www.olympedia.org/results/58578
4 Quotes from an interview between the journalist Pat Butcher and J. F. ‘Peter’ Harding, Secretary of Walton AC, in ‘Road Breaker’, Runner’s World, Sept. 1999, pp. 56–9.
5 W. Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain (New York: Wiley, 1952), p. 59.
6 On 14 October 1946, Ashby expresses this idea in his journal: ‘So in the conditioned reflex (or in every other physiological “business”) no matter what it may look like outside, the business inside must be “staying moderate”. So I am impelled to believe that the business outside is matched by no change inside. The more the outer changes, the more the inside doesn’t.’ Available from the W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive; https://ashby.info/journal/page/2064.html
7 Alan Turing in a letter to W. Ross Ashby, 19 Nov. 1946. See https://ashby.info/letters/turing.html
8 J. K. O’Regan (1992), ‘Solving the “real” mysteries of visual perception: the world as an outside memory’, Canadian Journal of Psychology/Revue Canadienne de Psychologie, 46(3), 461–88.
9 Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1978), p. 127,
10 Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943), ‘A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity’, Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5, 115–33.
11 Samuel Butler, ‘Darwin among the machines’, a letter to the editor of The Press, 1863. See http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html
12 While machines can’t (yet) design themselves, we are finding new ways the machine can help with the design, for example by making programming easier.
10. Gaslighting
1 Recorded on 1 February 1999. Available from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn562437; relevant section is from 22:55 to 30:20.
2 Letter from Max Planck to Adolf Hitler, written 25 Oct. 1944.
3 Albert Einstein in a letter to Max Born in 1926.
4 Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949)
5 John McCarthy et al. (1955), ‘A proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence’; http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html
6 For more on this story and Wiener’s extraordinary vision, personality and life, see Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics, (New York: Basic Books), 2005.
7 Norbert Wiener in a letter to his father. ‘Correspondence, 1913’ 25 October 1913. Norbert Wiener papers (MC-0022). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Libraries. Department of Distinctive Collections, https://dome.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.3/193611/abdb8ade94cb cee6440f04d4b5e56d98.pdf
8 Yossarian on ‘evasive action’ in Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961), p. 56.
9 http://matharts.aalto.fi/HintonCubes.pdf
10 W. Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain (New York: Wiley, 1952).
11 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd edn, 1996) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1st edn 1962).
12 Ibid., Ch. II, p. 10.
13 Nick Chater, The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind (London: Allen Lane, 2018), p. 21.
14 Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1978), p. 128.
15 This quote comes to me from my colleague Bernhard Schölkopf, who in his lectures on causality summarizes it more pithily as ‘thinking is acting in an imagined space’.
16 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
17 Article 27 (1) of the 1974 constitution of the German Democratic Republic, trans. from Wikisource at https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Constitution_of_the_German_Democratic_Republic_(1974). This article had remained in the constitution since the original 1949 version, where it was Article 9.
18 John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
19 Vera Lengsfeld, I Wanted to be Free: The Wall, the Stasi, the Revolution (Munich, Germany: Herbig, 2011). Original text in German Vera Lengsfeld, Ich wollte frei sein: Die Mauer, die Stasi, die Revolution. Quotes here are machine-translated from the original German.
20 Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956), pp. 323, 324.
11. Human–Analogue Machines
1 J. L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhart and Geoffrey E. Hinton, The Appeal of Parallel Distributed Processing in Parallel Distributed Processing, Volume 1, Rumelhart and McClelland (eds.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p. 3.
2 From ‘Discussion on making all things equal’, Chapter 2 of Zhuangzi: Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 44.
3 For example, the Mark 1 Fire Control Computer, which was a mechanical computer used during the Second World War to track targets that were represented by gear positions in the machine. See this YouTube video to learn more about its inner mechanism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9YEPw7_YTk.
4 http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/
5 Sir David Attenborough in The Private Life of Plants: ‘Travelling’, BBC, first broadcast 11 Jan. 1995.
6 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNKV7dY5PbE
7 F. Heider and M. Simmel (1944), ‘An experimental study of apparent behavior’, American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243–59; https://doi.org/10.2307/1416950
8 F. Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 1958).
9 Quote taken from Dave Gershgorn, ‘The data that transformed AI research – and possibly the world’, 26 July 2017, Quartz; https://qz.com/1034972/the-data-that-changed-the-direction-of-ai-research-and-possibly-the-world/
10 Highway Accident Report: Collision between vehicle controlled by developmental automated driving system and pedestrian, Tempe, Arizona, March 18, 2018. NTSB Report Number HWY18MH010. Available from https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket?ProjectID=96894
11 Highway Accident Report: Collision between a car operating with automated vehicle control systems and a tractor-semitrailer truck near Williston, Florida, May 7, 2016, NTSB Number HWY16FH018. Available from https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket?ProjectID=93548
12 Highway Accident Brief: Collision between car operating with partial driving automation and truck-tractor semitrailer, Delray Beach, Florida, March 1, 2019. NTSB Number HWY19FH008. Available from https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket?ProjectID=99043
13 Highway Accident Report: Collision between a sport utility vehicle operating with partial driving automation and a crash attenuator, Mountain View, California, March 23, 2018, NTSB Number HWY18FH011. Available from https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket?ProjectID=96932
14 ‘YOS 18, 114 Artifact Entry.’ Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI). 20 December 2001; https://cdli.ucla.edu/P142508.
15 Cuneiform tablet of unknown scribe written between 1250 and 1200 bce, found in Ur, trans. Jonathan Tenney. The text is known as ‘UET 7, 0011’. It was excavated at the ancient city of Ur and now rests in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Oliver R. Gurney (1974), ‘Middle Babylonian legal documents and other texts’, Ur Excavations. Texts 7 (London: The Trustees of the Two Museums). For more details on the tablet see https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/346976
16 In Akkadian, names invoke gods and have meanings we can only summarize in sentences. Negal was the god of war and plague; Nergal-aha-iddina means ‘Nergal gave me a brother’. Today lots of Hindi names share this characteristic, for example Subramanian means ‘dear to Brahmam’, and Ramanujan means ‘younger brother of Rama’.
17 Sin was the god of the Moon, and Sin-bununi means ‘Sin is our goodness’.
18 Siyatu’s name is shorter, indicating that it’s either the shortening of a longer name or a foreign name.
19 Adad was a god of storms. Adad-šuma-usur is ‘O Adad, safeguard the offspring’.
20 ‘A gift of Yeho’, where Yeho is the name of a later Levantine god who gained popularity from the Iron Age and eventually supplanted Jupiter for the Romans.
21 John F. Kennedy, ‘Address at Rice University on the nation’s space effort’, 12 Sept. 1962.
22 Simon Blackburn, Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 39.
