Well, enough quotes from speakers on "What Do We know?"

The answer appears akin to the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxies explanation of the population of the Universe.

But Nissam Taleb's book, stumbled over on The Long Tail blog, has raised a lot of thoughts.

The coincidental stumbling on "The Luck Factor" by Dr Richard Wiseman via a podcast Radio New Zealand interview couldn't be more complimentary.

Taleb's book brings together many of the usual suspects, and his observations about the inevitability of emotion, and the suggestion that its purpose is to short circuit rationality in order to reduce the burden of thinking about everything, and thus its an essential, resonates with Marvin Minsky's new book (very little of which I have read) but whose title mentions emotion as part of the discussion of AI.

Coincidentally I'm still reading, albeit very slowly, despite skipping over the self-dialogues of Kurzweil with various characters, "The Singularity Is Near." Its a discussion, one way or another of AI, particularly the "Strong AI" variant which engenders so much resistance there is an entire section, in which I am mired, that discusses the criticisms and seeks to refute them.

Taleb's premise is that the human mind has evolved with very simple purposes in mind, to be achieved in a very simple environment, one in which we no longer find ourselves. Indeed, perhaps for our evolved legacy skills, the Singularity has already arrived, and while we romantically expect certain competencies and behaviours, we find ourselves, collectively and individually, failing to live up to those expectations.

Another day, another list of atrocities committed singly or as collectives.

As for luck, to be alive is to have beaten extraordinary odds, not just the uncertainty of the environment with all its perils, but to have eluded our own species destructiveness. That the human family tree is shallow and that within relatively few generations we can find links between all of us living isn't as odd as it appears (a survivorship bias?) given our prediliction for extermination...

The other book currently being read, "Dark Age Ahead" by Jane Jacobs, fills me with dread.

Artificial Intelligence may be one that is better able to cope with randomness, more mechanical and deterministic, while aware as the billiard ball example in "Randomness" illustrates, determining anything of even moderate complexity requires collossal mega-exponential knowledge to determine.