“The chief virtue of AIs will be their alien intelligence. An AI will think about food differently than any chef, allowing us to think about food differently. Or to think about manufacturing materials differently. Or clothes. Or financial derivatives. Or any branch of science and art. The alienness of artificial intelligence will become more valuable to us than its speed or power.”

“You can’t provide a satisfying causal explanation for a behavior by merely positing that it is caused by some psychological force that operates to cause it. That’s like saying that the orbits of planets around the sun are caused by the “orbit-causing force.” …”

“I missed Christy Mathewson somehow but caught almost everyone else, down the years—Lefty Grove, Carl Hubbell, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, Jack Morris, Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson—but here was the best. Madison Bumgarner, the Giants’ left-handed ace, coming on in relief last night in the fifth inning of the deciding seventh game of this vibrant World Series, gave up a little opening single, then retired fourteen straight Kansas City batters, gave up another hit, and then closed the deal.”

“But as the attention of 21st‑century biology is now turning to the dynamics of ever-smaller systems – even individual atoms and molecules inside living cells – quantum mechanics is once again making its presence felt. Recent experiments indicate that some of life’s most fundamental processes do indeed depend on weirdness welling up from the quantum undercurrent of reality.”