John K. Clark

A wonderful book!

Revisado: 04-13-25

I read a lot of books but "The Thinking Machine" by Stephen Witt is the best one I've read in years. It's a biography of nVidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang but it's more than that, it's a concise history of Artificial Intelligence and of a company whose shares have increased in value by 300,000% since it went public in 1999. I highly recommend it.

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I highly recommend Deep Utopia

Revisado: 12-21-24

There are lots of books describing what will happen if the AI revolution turns bad but this is the first one I've heard of that discusses what will happen if things go right, how will we find meaning in our lives if machines can do everything better than we can? Bostrom suggests there may be several ways it might still be possible to have a meaningful life. Parts of the book remind me a little of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, and that is very high praise, although Bostrom is more interested in philosophy than science or mathematics.

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A brilliant and entertaining book

Revisado: 09-08-24

Usually a sequel is not quite as good as the original, but this five book series is an exception, the books just keep getting better and better. Book 5 is the best one yet. It's very unusual, and perhaps even unique, for any book or movie series to keep up that level of quality for so long. I'm eagerly anticipating book 6.

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Excellent summary of recent developments in astron

Revisado: 07-26-24

I almost didn't buy this book but I'm very glad I did! It's far better than I expected. If you're interested in the weird stuff that's going on in the universe this is the book for you.

John K Clark

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Read this book

Revisado: 07-11-24

Anybody unfamiliar with the concept of Atomically, precise manufacturing, should read this book, it will change the world!



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A brilliant book

Revisado: 07-03-24

Ray Kurzweil has the best record for accurately predicting technological developments in the business, And in this book He vividly and brilliantly describes what the future is going to look like. And it’s pretty amazing!

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A great book if you're serious about philosophy

Revisado: 05-04-24

I love this book! I especially liked chapter 5 where Schwitzgebel talks about "nonmaterial" Turing Machines, by which I assume he means a machine made out of stuff other than matter or energy as we currently understand them, but nevertheless operates according to the laws of cause and effect. Chapter 6 was also fun and, as far as I can tell, unique. He was smart not to even try to prove that solipsism is impossible but instead show that it is improbable, that is to say external universe theories can explain observations better than solipsism can, and do so without undergoing the logical contortions that solipsism requires. So Occam's razor gives solipsism a thumbs down. Even the book's appendix is great, it's just as enjoyable as the rest of the book.

John K Clark

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Quite good but I do have a reservation

Revisado: 02-04-24

I enjoyed "On The Origin Of Time" a great deal, however at one point professor Hertog says that the trouble with anthropomorphic reasoning when used for cosmology is that it claims to be able to predict what "we" should expect to see but does not make clear exactly what "we" means. In this context I would say that "we" means any stable structure that is able to process information intelligently. So somewhere in the multiverse there could be a universe without DNA or atoms or even electrons but can nevertheless support structures made of some sort of stuff that can process data intelligently by using laws of physics that are radically different from anything we know about because they simply don't exist here. And by using the exact same anthropomorphic reasoning that we do, these observers should expect to find that the fundamental physical constants that have produced their world allow for the existence of their form of life, but just barely. So even there the illusion that life has been fine tuned would exist despite the fact that life worked completely differently there than the way it operates here; the only thing we do have in common is both universes support structures that can process data.

I believe data processing is important because I think consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed intelligently. As for "intelligence" I can't give a definition but I can give things that are more fundamental, examples; after all examples are what gave lexicographers the knowledge to write their dictionary.

John K Clark

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Great book

Revisado: 09-25-23

After reading Walter Isaacson's book my opinion of Elon Musk is conflicted. Musk is brilliant, incredibly hard-working, not afraid to take a risk and is willing to backtrack and admit it when he's wrong. Musk is impulsive, most of his impulses turned out to be correct but not all, he says that many of his tweets were stupid and he wished he had never sent them. Musk is not evil but he is a jerk and I'd rather eat ground glass than work for him. Musk cares enormously for the well-being of the human race in the abstract but he doesn't care much about individual human beings, he has Asperger's Syndrome and says that his brain's neural net is not wired up for empathy. Nevertheless if Elon Musk had never been born then Tesla, SpaceX, NeuroLink, The Boring Company and XAI would not exist and the world would've been a less interesting place. My opinion of him, positive or negative, would not interest Musk one bit, he's not interested in anybody's opinion of him, but for whatever it's worth I can't help but admire the guy. But I don't like him.

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One of Kings best

Revisado: 03-24-23

I've read quite a number of Stephen King books but I don't think I've read one that I've enjoyed more than "The Institute ". I give it five stars out of five.

John K Clark

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