Deep Thought Computer Quotes

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness. We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things. We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less. These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete... Remember, to spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever. Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side. Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn't cost a cent. Remember, to say, "I love you" to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you. Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person might not be there again. Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.

O Deep Thought computer," he said, "the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us...." he paused, "The Answer." "The Answer?" said Deep Thought. "The Answer to what?" "Life!" urged Fook. "The Universe!" said Lunkwill. "Everything!" they said in chorus. Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection. "Tricky," he said finally. "But can you do it?" Again, a significant pause. "Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it." "There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement. "Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But, I'll have to think about it." ... Fook glanced impatiently at his watch. “How long?” he said. “Seven and a half million years,” said Deep Thought. Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other. “Seven and a half million years...!” they cried in chorus. “Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I?" [Seven and a half million years later.... Fook and Lunkwill are long gone, but their descendents continue what they started] "We are the ones who will hear," said Phouchg, "the answer to the great question of Life....!" "The Universe...!" said Loonquawl. "And Everything...!" "Shhh," said Loonquawl with a slight gesture. "I think Deep Thought is preparing to speak!" There was a moment's expectant pause while panels slowly came to life on the front of the console. Lights flashed on and off experimentally and settled down into a businesslike pattern. A soft low hum came from the communication channel. "Good Morning," said Deep Thought at last. "Er..good morning, O Deep Thought" said Loonquawl nervously, "do you have...er, that is..." "An Answer for you?" interrupted Deep Thought majestically. "Yes, I have." The two men shivered with expectancy. Their waiting had not been in vain. "There really is one?" breathed Phouchg. "There really is one," confirmed Deep Thought. "To Everything? To the great Question of Life, the Universe and everything?" "Yes." Both of the men had been trained for this moment, their lives had been a preparation for it, they had been selected at birth as those who would witness the answer, but even so they found themselves gasping and squirming like excited children. "And you're ready to give it to us?" urged Loonsuawl. "I am." "Now?" "Now," said Deep Thought. They both licked their dry lips. "Though I don't think," added Deep Thought. "that you're going to like it." "Doesn't matter!" said Phouchg. "We must know it! Now!" "Now?" inquired Deep Thought. "Yes! Now..." "All right," said the computer, and settled into silence again. The two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable. "You're really not going to like it," observed Deep Thought. "Tell us!" "All right," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the Great Question..." "Yes..!" "Of Life, the Universe and Everything..." said Deep Thought. "Yes...!" "Is..." said Deep Thought, and paused. "Yes...!" "Is..." "Yes...!!!...?" "Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact 42- and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.

The Googleplex Star Thinker is a super-computer from the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity and has the ability to calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle during a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard. The Deep Thought computer call it a pocket calculator in comparison to itself.

For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program. And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.

Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.

Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world.

O Deep Thought computer,” he said, “the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us …” he paused, “the Answer!” “The Answer?” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to what?” “Life!” urged Fook. “The Universe!” said Lunkwill. “Everything!” they said in chorus. Deep Thought paused for a moment’s reflection. “Tricky,” he said finally. “But can you do it?” Again, a significant pause. “Yes,” said Deep Thought, “I can do it.” “There is an answer?” said Fook with breathless excitement. “A simple answer?” added Lunkwill. “Yes,” said Deep Thought. “Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But,” he added, “I’ll have to think about it.

Human beings have only a weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. To do logical thinking, we need to use the neocortex, which is basically a large pattern recognizer. It is not an ideal mechanism for performing logical transformations, but it is the only facility we have for the job. Compare, for example, how a human plays chess to how a typical computer chess program works. Deep Blue, the computer that defeated Garry Kasparov, the human world chess champion, in 1997 was capable of analyzing the logical implications of 200 million board positions (representing different move-countermove sequences) every second. (That can now be done, by the way, on a few personal computers.) Kasparov was asked how many positions he could analyze each second, and he said it was less than one. How is it, then, that he was able to hold up to Deep Blue at all? The answer is the very strong ability humans have to recognize patterns. However, we need to train this facility, which is why not everyone can play master chess.

Personally I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world championship. Humanitiy needs a lesson in humility.

For years, coders have been programming computers so that they perform repetitive tasks for us. Now they automate our repetitive thoughts.

I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me,” intoned Deep Thought, his voice regaining its accustomed declamatory tones. “A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate—and yet I will design it for you. A computer that can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program! Yes! I shall design this computer for you. And I shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called…the Earth.” Phouchg

Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm. It was a long time before anyone spoke. Out of the corner of his eye Phouchg could see the sea of tense expectant faces down in the square outside. "We're going to get lynched aren't we?" he whispered. "It was a tough assignment," said Deep Thought mildly. "Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?" "I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." "But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!" howled Loonquawl. "Yes," said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, "but what actually is it?" A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other. "Well, you know, it's just Everything ... Everything ..." offered Phouchg weakly. "Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means.

Annie clouded up. For a second, he thought she was going to erupt, and flinched. She saw that...and got control of herself with an visible effort. She took three deep breaths, each longer than the last, and her features became serene. All at once it seemed totally clear to Mike that she was right and he was nuts - that his ingenius theory was nonsense, childish, fantasty bullshit. His conviction evaporated, and he was ashamed. He felt his cheeks grow hot, groped for words with which to backtrack - "I have to admit I have no better explanation for the the facts," Annie said slowly. Again, Mike did an emotional instant 180. "Holy shit -" She held up a hand. "I am going to think now. Very hard, for a long time. You will be as quiet as possible while I do." She got up from the computer, went to the bed, and lay down. "Think yourself, or read, or play games with the headphones on, or go Topside if you like." She clasped her hands on her belly, closed her eyes and appeared to go to sleep

The offices in the skyscrapers were lit bright as day. The giant eye zoomed in and observed a hundred thousand faces staring at computer monitors through closed-circuit cameras; their tension, anxiety, anticipation, confusion, satisfaction, suspicion, jealousy, anger refreshed rapidly while their glasses reflected the data jumping across their screens. Their looks were empty but deep, without thought of the relationship between their lives and values, yearning for change but also afraid of it. They gazed at their screens the way they gazed at each other, and they hated their screens the way they hated each other. They all possessed the same bored, apathetic face.

A third position has been called "strong Al." When the Mind As Computer metaphor is believed as a deep scientific truth, the true believers interpret the ontology and the inferential patterns that the metaphor imposes on the mind as defining the essence of mind itself. For them, concepts are formal symbols, thought is computation (the manipulation of those symbols), and the mind is a computer program.

Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.

Suddenly Arthur began to feel his apparently nonexistent scalp begin to crawl as he found himself moving slowly but inexorably forward toward the console, but it was only a dramatic zoom on the part of whoever had made the recording, he assumed. “I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me,” intoned Deep Thought, his voice regaining its accustomed declamatory tones. “A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate—and yet I will design it for you. A computer that can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program! Yes! I shall design this computer for you. And I shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called … the Earth.

Ink was black, in inkwells and bottles, in the past. It would get all over your fingers because it would run and flow relentlessly. This inevitable messiness was the flip side of writing. I always felt caught between two kinds of black: that of the dirty and dirtying substance and that of the signs that miraculously emerged from it through the magic of wayward fountain pens, which, when dipped too deep in the inkwell, had a strong tendency to cover the paper with what used to be called “inkblots.” Oh, the miracle of a clear and possibly elegant sentence emerging from the sticky ink and wending its way between the blots! It is the black of meaning wrung from the black of matter. (…) Isn’t the most profound education the one that was afforded me at my childhood elementary school, the one that divides the ink sharply between thought become Letter and drive turned into splotches and blots? How will those who begin with the darkish gray on the palish gray of computer screens manage? Without the slightest inkblot? Won’t they think that thought is just another variation of formlessness, that the intellect is just a thin additional coat of gray over the gray of drive, and drive a mere stripping of the gray of the intellect? Everything in the world is the result of a creative and careful dosing of black as it is projected onto the formidable invariability of white. Anyone who hasn’t experienced this, and sooner rather than later, will never learn anything.

I made a record called Island in the Sun about the planet Earth and invited David over to hear it at the house I had rented in Hawaii. We was not impressed with it and asked me to do something else. That was the first time that had ever happened to me. It was a good record, and I liked it. To accommodate David, I thought I would do a record that was a combination of that one and one that I was already hearing in my head to follow up. The second one, Trans , was inspired by my son Ben and his communication challenges. Because of Ben's quadriplegia, he couldn't talk or communicate in a way that most people could understand, so I made a record where I sang through a machine and most people couldn't understand what I was saying, either. I felt like it was art, an expression of something deeply personal. I called it Trans, meaning trying to get across from one world to another, being locked in a body without an intelligible voice, trying to communicate through the use of machines, computers, switches and other devices. It was a very deep and inaccessible concept

Being a brash entrepreneur, Roberts responded to the crisis by deciding to launch a whole new business. He had always been fascinated by computers, and he assumed that other hobbyists felt the same. His goal, he enthused to a friend, was building a computer for the masses that would eliminate the Computer Priesthood once and for all. After studying the instruction set for the Intel 8080, Roberts concluded that MITS could make a do-it-yourself kit for a rudimentary computer that would be so cheap, under $400, that every enthusiast would buy it. “We thought he was off the deep end,” a colleague later confessed.112 Ed Roberts (1941–2010).

Now?’ ‘Now,’ said Deep Thought. They both licked their dry lips. ‘Though I don’t think,’ added Deep Thought, ‘that you’re going to like it.’ ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Phouchg. ‘We must know it! Now!’ ‘Now?’ enquired Deep Thought. ‘Yes! Now . . .’ ‘All right,’ said the computer and settled into silence again. The two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable. ‘You’re really not going to like it,’ observed Deep Thought. ‘Tell us!’ ‘All right,’ said Deep Thought. ‘The Answer to the Great Question . . .’ ‘Yes . . . !’ ‘Of Life, the Universe and Everything . . .’ said Deep Thought. ‘Yes . . . !’ ‘Is . . .’ said Deep Thought, and paused. ‘Yes . . . !’ ‘Is . . .’ ‘Yes . . . !!! . . . ?’ ‘Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Issib wasn't thrilled to see him. I'm busy and don't need interruptions." "This is the household library," said Nafai. "This is where we always come to do research." "See? You're interrupting already." "Look, I didn't say anything, I just came in here, and you started picking at me the second I walked in the door." "I was hoping you'd walk back out." "I can't. Mother sent me here." Nafai walked over behind Issib, who was floating comfortably in the air in front of his computer display. It was layered thirty pages deep, but each page had only a few words on it, so he could see almost everything at once. Like a game of solitaire, in which Issib was simply moving fragments from place to place. The fragments were all words in weird languages. The ones Nafai recognized were very old. "What language is that?" Nafai asked pointing, to one. Issib signed. "I'm so glad you're not interrupting me." "What is it, some ancient form of Vijati?" "Very good. It's Slucajan, which came from Obilazati, the original form of Vijati. It's dead now." "I read Vijati, you know." "I don't." "Oh, so you're specializing in ancient, obscure languages that nobody speaks anymore, including you?" "I'm not learning these languages, I'm researching lost words." "If the whole language is dead, then all the words are lost." "Words that used to have meanings, but that died out or survived only in idiomatic expressions. Like 'dancing bear.' What's a bear, do you know?" "I don't know. I always thought it was some kind of graceful bird." "Wrong. It's an ancient mammal. Known only on Earth, I think, and not brought here. Or it died out soon. It was bigger than a man, very powerful. A predator." "And it danced?" "The expression used to mean something absurdly clumsy. Like a dog walking on its hind legs." "And now it means the opposite. That's weird. How could it change?" "Because there aren't any bears. THe meaning used to be obvious, because everybody knew a bear and how clumsy it would look, dancing. But when the bears were gone, the meaning could go anywhere. Now we use it for a person who's extremely deft in getting out of an embarrassing social situation. It's the only case that we use the word bear anymore. And you see a lot of people misspelling it, too." "Great stuff. You doing a linguistics project?" "No." "What's this for, then?" "Me." "Just collection old idioms?" "Lost words." "Like bear? The word isn't lost, Issya. It's the bears that are gone." "Very good, Nyef. You get full credit for the assignment. Go away now.

About sixty thousand different thoughts are said to go through a person’s mind over the course of a day. Ninety-five percent of that is made up of the same things we’d been thinking about the day before, and 80 percent of those thoughts are believed to be negative. In my days as a maximalist, I lived in fear of my future, constantly worrying about my career and how others saw me. Forget about that 80 percent I mentioned a moment earlier—practically all my thoughts were negative. So, how do you make a slow computer like that work properly? Since our fifty-thousand-year-old hardware isn’t going to change, we need to get rid of the extra load that isn’t needed. Rather than trying to add more and more, running out of disk space and exhausting ourselves in the process, I think it’s time we started thinking about subtracting and refining to enhance the truly important things that might be buried deep down underneath all that excess.

So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?" "He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning." "But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits." "Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret." "The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it." "Yes. This was his interpretation." "Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?" "Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and of the body." "Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs in English?" "Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago." "A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking." "Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'" "The machine language of the world," Hiro says.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his first mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake. Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.” Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate. Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something; sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both. Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.) Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

Then a thought hit me like a ton of slag. Arlene wouldn’t bother taking time in this hellhole to scribble her mark unless she had a damned good reason. Not just to point out the sphere—if she knew it was there, she’d have used it herself like a good soldier. The only logical conclusion was that the arrow pointed the way out of the nuclear plant—the way Arlene Sanders had already gone. Like Arne Saknussen, she marked her own trail for all who followed. So why hadn’t I found it? Same way Arlene missed the patio door: there had to be another hidden door nearby that I had missed. Third time’s the charm. The damned door couldn’t have been more than five feet from the one I had found. One good push and it was open, leading to a beautiful piece of straight, well-lit corridor that reached its end with a clean, massive metal door that had printed on it the welcome letters EXIT—obviously a holdover from the plant’s mundane days as a hangout for humans. Feeling bold and unstoppable, I walked right up to that door and discovered that it required a computer key card before it would bless the lonely traveler with an open sesame. Great. Now I could be miserable again.

The time is nearly upon us,” said one, and Arthur was surprised to see a word suddenly materialize in thin air just by the man’s neck. The word was LOONQUAWL, and it flashed a couple of times and then disappeared again. Before Arthur was able to assimilate this the other man spoke and the word PHOUCHG appeared by his neck. “Seventy-five thousand generations ago, our ancestors set this program in motion,” the second man said, “and in all that time we will be the first to hear the computer speak.” “An awesome prospect, Phouchg,” agreed the first man, and Arthur suddenly realized he was watching a recording with subtitles. “We are the ones who will hear,” said Phouchg, “the answer to the great question of Life …!” “The Universe …!” said Loonquawl. “And Everything …!” “Shhh,” said Loonquawl with a slight gesture, “I think Deep Thought is preparing to speak!” There was a moment’s expectant pause while panels slowly came to life on the front of the console. Lights flashed on and off experimentally and settled down into a businesslike pattern. A soft low hum came from the communication channel. “Good morning,” said Deep Thought at last. “Er … good morning, O Deep Thought,” said Loonquawl nervously, “do you have … er, that is …” “An answer for you?” interrupted Deep Thought majestically. “Yes. I have.” The two men shivered with expectancy. Their waiting had not been in vain. “There really is one?” breathed Phouchg. “There really is one,” confirmed Deep Thought. “To Everything? To the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything?” “Yes.” Both of the men had been trained for this moment, their lives had been a preparation for it, they had been selected at birth as those who would witness the answer, but even so they found themselves gasping and squirming like excited children. “And you’re ready to give it to us?” urged Loonquawl. “I am.” “Now?” “Now,” said Deep Thought. They both licked their dry lips. “Though I don’t think,” added Deep Thought, “that you’re going to like it.” “Doesn’t matter!” said Phouchg. “We must know it! Now!” “Now?” inquired Deep Thought. “Yes! Now …” “All right,” said the computer, and settled into silence again. The two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable. “You’re really not going to like it,” observed Deep Thought. “Tell us!” “All right,” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to the Great Question …” “Yes …!” “Of Life, the Universe and Everything …” said Deep Thought. “Yes …!” “Is …” said Deep Thought, and paused. “Yes …!” “Is …” “Yes …!!! …?” “Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Specifically, the awareness that I claim is demonstrably non-computational is our understanding of the properties of natural numbers 0,1,2,3,4,....(One might even say that our concept of a natural number is, in a sense, a form of non-geometric 'visualization'.) We shall see in 2.5, by a readily accessible form of Godel's theorem (cf. response to query Q16), that this understanding is something that cannot be simulated computationally. From time to time one hears that some computer system has been 'trained' so as to 'understand' the concept of natural numbers. However, this cannot be true, as we shall see. It is our awareness of what a 'number' can actually mean that enables us to latch on to the correct concept. When we have this correct concept, we can-at least in principle-provide the correct answers to families of questions about numbers that are put to us, when no finite set of rules can do this. With only rules and no direct awareness, a computer-controlled robot (like Deep Thought) would be necessarily limited in ways in which we are not limited ourselves-although if we give the robot clever enough rules for its behaviour it may perform prodigious feats, some of which lie far beyond unaided human capabilities in specific narrowly enough defined areas, and it might be able to fool us, for some while, into thinking that it also possesses awareness.

All I wanted to say,” bellowed the computer, “is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” He paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone’s attention, before continuing more quietly. “But the program will take me a little while to run.” Fook glanced impatiently at his watch. “How long?” he said. “Seven and a half million years,” said Deep Thought. Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other. “Seven and a half million years!” they cried in chorus. “Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “I said I’d have to think about it, didn’t I? And it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole are of philosophy in general. Everyone’s going to have their own theories about what answer I’m eventually going to come up with, and who better, to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?” The two philosophers gaped at him. “Bloody hell,” said Majikthise, “now that is what I call thinking. Here, Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?” “Dunno,” said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper; “think our brains must be too highly trained, Majikthise.” So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door and into a life-style beyond their wildest dreams.

But what about the things that you CANNOT do with the electronic version [of a book]? You cannot drop the computer on the floor in a fit of pique, or slam it shut. You cannot leave a bookmark with a note on it in a computer and then come upon it after several years and feel happy you've found something you thought you had lost. You cannot get any sort of tactile pleasure from rubbing the pages of a computer. (Maybe some people do get a tactile pleasure from rubbing their computers, but they are not people I have any interest in knowing anything about.) Reading on a computer screen gives you no sense of time or investment. The page always looks the same, and everything else is always in the same exact spot. When reading a book, no matter how large or small it is, a tension builds, concurrent with your progress through its pages. I get a nervous excitement as I see the number of pages that remain to be read draining inexorably from the right to the left... I've never sat down at a new computer and, prior to using it, felt a deep and abiding need to open it up and sniff it as deeply as I can, the way I have with my a book...and though a computer will inarguably hold far more information than even the largest of books, sitting down at a computer has never provided me with that delicious anticipatory sense that I am about to be utterly and rhapsodically transported by the words within it. I've never looked across the room at my computer and fondly remembered things that I once read in it. I can while away hours at a time just standing in front of my books and relive my favourite passages by merely gazing at their spines. I have never walked into a room full of computers, far from home, and immediately felt a warm familiarity come over me, the way I have with every library I've ever set foot in. It is not so much that I am anti-computer; I am resolutely and stubbornly pro-book.

It's funny, you know. We're free. We make choices. We weigh things in our minds, consider everything carefully, use all the tools of logic and education. And in the end, what we mostly do is what we have no choice but to do. Makes you think, why bother? But you bother because you do, that's why. Because you're a DNA-brand computer running Childhood 1.0 software. They update the software but the changes are always just around the edges. You have the brain you have, the intelligence, the talents, the strengths and weaknesses you have, from the moment they take you out of the box and throw away the Styrofoam padding. But you have the fears you picked up along the way. The terrors of age four or six or eight are never suspended, just layered over. The dread I'd felt so recently, a dread that should be so much greater because the facts had been so much more horrible, still could not diminish the impact of memories that had been laid down long years before. It's that way all through life, I guess. I have a relative who says she still gets depressed every September because in the back of her mind it's time for school to start again. She's my great-aunt. The woman is sixty-seven and still bumming over the first day of school five-plus decades ago. It's sad in a way because the pleasures of life get old and dated fast. The teenage me doesn't get the jolt the six-year-old me got from a package of Pop Rocks. The me I've become doesn't rush at the memories of the day I skated down a parking ramp however many years ago. Pleasure fades, gets old, gets thrown out with last year's fad. Fear, guilt, all that stuff stays fresh. Maybe that's why people get so enraged when someone does something to a kid. Hurt a kid and he hurts forever. Maybe an adult can shake it off. Maybe. But with a kid, you hurt them and it turns them, shapes them, becomes part of the deep, underlying software of their lives. No delete. I don't know. I don't know much. I feel like I know less all the time. Rate I'm going, by the time I'm twenty-one I won't know a damned thing. But still I was me. Had no choice, I guess. I don't know, maybe that's bull and I was just feeling sorry for myself. But, bottom line, I dried my eyes, and I pushed my dirty, greasy hair back off my face, and I started off down the road again because whatever I was, whoever I was, however messed up I might be, I wasn't leaving April behind. Maybe it was all an act programmed into me from the get-go, or maybe it grew up out of some deep-buried fear, I mean maybe at some level I was really just as pathetic as Senna thought I was. Maybe I was a fake. Whatever. Didn't matter. I was going back to the damned dragon, and then I was getting April out, and everything and everyone else could go screw themselves. One good thing: For now at least, I was done being scared.

One persistent attempt to find a thread in the history of mankind focuses on the notion of Reason. Human history, on this view, is the unfolding of rationality. Human thought, institutions, social organization, become progressively more rational. The idea that Reason is the goal or end-point of the development of mankind can fuse with the view that it also constitutes the principal agency which impels humanity along its path. It seems natural to suppose that changes in human life spring from growth of our ideas, our ways of thought. What is conduct if not implementation of ideas? If we improve, is it not because our ideas have improved? Though somewhat suspect as the fruit of vainglorious self-congratulation by nineteenth century Europeans, the role of thought and reason still deserves some consideration. The problems and difficulties facing a reason-centred view of history are considerable. No doubt the idea is far less popular now than it was in the heady days of rationalistic optimism, which stretched, in one form or another, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. But, in a sober and not necessarily optimistic form, it remains necessary to attempt some kind of sketch of the cognitive transformation of mankind, from the days of hunting to those of computing. The nature of our cognitive activities has not remained constant: not only have things changed, but the change has also been deep and fundamental. It is not merely a matter of more of the same. The changes that have occurred have been changes in kind. A convenient baseline or starting point for the discussion of this problem is provided by the blatant absurdity of some at least of the beliefs of primitive man. Many of us like to think that the standards of what is acceptable in matters of belief have gone up, and that the advance of reason in history is manifest in this raising of standards. We have become fastidious and shrink from the beliefs of our distant ancestors, which strike us as absurd. Perhaps, so as not to prejudge an important issue, one ought to say-it is the translations frequently offered of some of the beliefs of some primitive men which now seem so absurd. It may be—and some have indeed argued this—that the absurdity is located not in the original belief itself but in its translation, inspired by a failure to understand the original context. On this view, it is the modern translator, and not the savage, who is guilty of absurdity.

One persistent attempt to find a thread in the history of mankind focuses on the notion of Reason. Human history, on this view, is the unfolding of rationality. Human thought, institutions, social organization, become progressively more rational. The idea that Reason is the goal or end-point of the development of mankind can fuse with the view that it also constitutes the principal agency which impels humanity along its path. It seems natural to suppose that changes in human life spring from growth of our ideas, our ways of thought. What is conduct if not implementation of ideas? If we improve, is it not because our ideas have improved? Though somewhat suspect as the fruit of vainglorious self-congratulation by nineteenth century Europeans, the role of thought and reason still deserves some consideration. The problems and difficulties facing a reason-centred view of history are considerable. No doubt the idea is far less popular now than it was in the heady days of rationalistic optimism, which stretched, in one form or another, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. But, in a sober and not necessarily optimistic form, it remains necessary to attempt some kind of sketch of the cognitive transformation of mankind, from the days of hunting to those of computing. The nature of our cognitive activities has not remained constant: not only have things changed, but the change has also been deep and fundamental. It is not merely a matter of more of the same. The changes that have occurred have been changes in kind. A convenient baseline or starting point for the discussion of this problem is provided by the blatant absurdity of some at least of the beliefs of primitive man. Many of us like to think that the standards of what is acceptable in matters of belief have gone up, and that the advance of reason in history is manifest in this raising of standards. We have become fastidious and shrink from the beliefs of our distant ancestors, which strike us as absurd. Perhaps, so as not to prejudge an important issue, one ought to say - it is the translations frequently offered of some of the beliefs of some primitive men which now seem so absurd. It may be — and some have indeed argued this — that the absurdity is located not in the original belief itself but in its translation, inspired by a failure to understand the original context. On this view, it is the modern translator, and not the savage, who is guilty of absurdity.

The first thing I do is take a final look at my e-mail inbox to ensure that there’s nothing requiring an urgent response before the day ends. The next thing I do is transfer any new tasks that are on my mind or were scribbled down earlier in the day into my official task lists. (I use Google Docs for storing my task lists, as I like the ability to access them from any computer—but the technology here isn’t really relevant.) Once I have these task lists open, I quickly skim every task in every list, and then look at the next few days on my calendar. These two actions ensure that there’s nothing urgent I’m forgetting or any important deadlines or appointments sneaking up on me. I have, at this point, reviewed everything that’s on my professional plate. To end the ritual, I use this information to make a rough plan for the next day. Once the plan is created, I say, “Shutdown complete,” and my work thoughts are done for the day.

I surface from the simulation with a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I detach from the wires and get up. She’s still recovering from the sensation of almost drowning, shaking her hands and taking deep breaths. I watch her for a moment, not sure how to say what I need to say. “What?” she says. “How did you do that?” “Do what?” “Crack the glass.” “I don’t know.” I nod, and offer her my hand. She gets up without any trouble, but she avoids my eyes. I check the corners of the room for cameras. There is one, just where I thought it would be, right across from us. I take her elbow and lead her out of the room, to a place where I know we won’t be observed, in the blind spot between two surveillance points. “What?” she says irritably. “You’re Divergent,” I say. I haven’t been very nice to her today. Last night I saw her and her friends by the chasm, and a lapse in judgment--or sobriety--led me to lean in too close, to tell her she looked good. I’m worried that I went too far. Now I’m even more worried, but for different reasons. She cracked the glass. She’s Divergent. She’s in danger. She stares. Then she sinks against the wall, adopting an almost-convincing aura of casualness. “What’s Divergent?” “Don’t play stupid,” I say. “I suspected it last time, but this time it’s obvious. You manipulated the simulation; you’re Divergent. I’ll delete the footage, but unless you want to wind up dead at the bottom of the chasm, you’ll figure out how to hide it during the simulations! Now, if you’ll excuse me.” I walk back to the simulation room, pulling the door closed behind me. It’s easy to delete the footage--just a few keystrokes and it’s done, the record clean. I double-check her file, making sure the only thing that’s in there is the data from the first simulation. I’ll have to come up with a way to explain where the data from this session went. A good lie, one that Eric and Max will actually believe. In a hurry, I take out my pocketknife and wedge it between the panels covering the motherboard of the computer, prying them apart. Then I go into the hallway, to the drinking fountain, and fill my mouth with water. When I return to the simulation room, I spit some of the water into the gap between the panels. I put my knife away and wait. A minute or so later, the screen goes dark. Dauntless headquarters is basically a leaky cave--water damage happens all the time.

many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights Consider the following excerpt from a 2006 paper that appeared in the journal Science: The scientific literature has emphasized the benefits of conscious deliberation in decision making for hundreds of years… The question addressed here is whether this view is justified. We hypothesize that it is not. Lurking in this bland statement is a bold claim. The authors of this study, led by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, set out to prove that some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over. Dijksterhuis’s team isolated this effect by giving subjects the information needed for a complex decision regarding a car purchase. Half the subjects were told to think through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group ended up performing better. Observations from experiments such as this one led Dijksterhuis and his collaborators to introduce unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. UTT hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions. The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges. A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.

This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together. In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process. The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before. Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic. You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.

On the next page is the Artist Clarity Worksheet, which will guide you to determining what you really want. IMPORTANT: To get the most out of all of the exercises in this book, don’t type your answers into a computer or electronic device. Instead, write your answers into a notebook or in this book. Using pen on paper accesses a part of your brain that is wired to find answers that are deep inside you. This is what will help you get results. If this doesn’t make sense to you, do it anyway. Often, we don’t even know the answers we are seeking, but when we sit and quietly write on paper, ideas and thoughts come to us. If you don’t know what to write, then write anything you want, just to get the energy flowing. The process of writing leads your mind to grasp for answers, often buried deep inside you. Take your time daydreaming as you answer the questions. Make sure to enjoy the process—dreaming about your ideal lifestyle should be fun and fill you with enthusiasm (if it doesn’t, keep exploring until you find a vision that does!)

The out-of-the-box California physicists beat their heads against this problem for years, but by the early 1980s, it became apparent that there is no way to send a signal via entanglement alone. For one thing, if you force one of a pair of entangled particles into a certain state, the entanglement with the other particle will be broken, so it will not “send” information about its state to its twin. You are limited to performing measurements of a particle’s uncertain value, which compels it to make up its mind about the (previously uncertain) state it is in. In that case, you can be sure its entangled twin will make the same choice, but then some additional information channel needs to be available to let your distant partner know what measurement you performed and what result you got. The latter part of the problem has an analogy in basic semantics. For a piece of information to be meaningful, it needs to be reliably paired with another piece of information that gives it context or serves as its cipher. If I say “yes” to my wife, it can only be meaningless noise, a random word, unless my utterance was produced in the context of a question, like “Are you going to the store later?” Without knowing exactly how the physicist on Earth measured her particle, Alice, and what result she got, the change in Alice’s entangled partner Bob four light years away in that lab orbiting Alpha Centauri cannot be meaningful, even if it is information. The Earth physicist needs to send some slower-than-light signal to inform her distant colleague about her measurement and its outcome … which defeats the whole purpose of using entanglement to carry a message.47 This is also the problem with the metaphor of the universe as a computer. No matter how much computation the universe can perform, its outputs can be little more than out-of-context yesses and nos, addressed to no one in particular. If there is no “outside” to the system, there is nothing to compare it to and no one to give all those bit flips meaning. In fact, it is a lot like the planetary supercomputer “Deep Thought” in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: When, after millions of years of computation, it finally utters its output, “42,” no one knows what it means, because the question the computer had been programmed to answer has long been forgotten. We are now perhaps in a better position to understand how the behavior of atoms, photons, and subatomic particles could carry information about their future—tons of information—without any of it being meaningful to us, and why we would naturally (mis)construe it as randomness: It is noise to our ears, stuck as we are in the Now with no way of interpreting it. It is like the future constantly sending back strings of yesses and nos without us knowing the questions.

The out-of-the-box California physicists beat their heads against this problem for years, but by the early 1980s, it became apparent that there is no way to send a signal via entanglement alone. For one thing, if you force one of a pair of entangled particles into a certain state, the entanglement with the other particle will be broken, so it will not “send” information about its state to its twin. You are limited to performing measurements of a particle’s uncertain value, which compels it to make up its mind about the (previously uncertain) state it is in. In that case, you can be sure its entangled twin will make the same choice, but then some additional information channel needs to be available to let your distant partner know what measurement you performed and what result you got. The latter part of the problem has an analogy in basic semantics. For a piece of information to be meaningful, it needs to be reliably paired with another piece of information that gives it context or serves as its cipher. If I say “yes” to my wife, it can only be meaningless noise, a random word, unless my utterance was produced in the context of a question, like “Are you going to the store later?” Without knowing exactly how the physicist on Earth measured her particle, Alice, and what result she got, the change in Alice’s entangled partner Bob four light years away in that lab orbiting Alpha Centauri cannot be meaningful, even if it is information. The Earth physicist needs to send some slower-than-light signal to inform her distant colleague about her measurement and its outcome … which defeats the whole purpose of using entanglement to carry a message.47 This is also the problem with the metaphor of the universe as a computer. No matter how much computation the universe can perform, its outputs can be little more than out-of-context yesses and nos, addressed to no one in particular. If there is no “outside” to the system, there is nothing to compare it to and no one to give all those bit flips meaning. In fact, it is a lot like the planetary supercomputer “Deep Thought” in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: When, after millions of years of computation, it finally utters its output, “42,” no one knows what it means, because the question the computer had been programmed to answer has long been forgotten. We are now perhaps in a better position to understand how the behavior of atoms, photons, and subatomic particles could carry information about their future—tons of information—without any of it being meaningful to us, and why we would naturally (mis)construe it as randomness: It is noise to our ears, stuck as we are in the Now with no way of interpreting it. It is like the future constantly sending back strings of yesses and nos without us knowing the questions. We are only now realizing that there may indeed be words in all that noise—it’s not just gibberish. But how to decode them?

However, just sitting in a chair addressing the camera seemed a little too maniacal; too Bond villain-ish. I might as well have sat down in a computer chair and spun around stroking a cat when the cameras started rolling. I chuckled at the thought of that. I’d probably name the cat Socks, because it would have black markings on its feet that would look like socks and—I shook the thoughts from my mind. I clenched my eyes and took a deep breath. Focus, Kane. Focus, I told myself. I was really, really nervous.

One spring day, I was away on a business trip; Karen was home with the kids. It was a warm afternoon, and she was sitting with our son Matthew at the computer in my office. The kitchen door that leads to the backyard was open. They were reviewing a homework project when they heard what sounded like fingernails scratching on the hardwood floors in the kitchen followed by a thumping gallop from our cat Sox. An instant later, a squirrel raced into the office with the cat at its heels. In a panic, Karen grabbed Matthew and the cat, and ran out of the office slamming the door behind her. Her plan was to leave the squirrel in my office and let me deal with it when I got home in a few days; the homework could wait. However, 30 minutes and two glasses of Merlot later, Karen saw the flaw in her plan. She wasn’t worried so much about sticking me with the task of removing a hungry, pissed-off squirrel from my office as she was the possibility of the squirrel shredding everything in there before I got home. Or worse, she feared the house would permanently smell of dead squirrel. There was a decent chance her scream gave it a heart attack. Luckily, the window in my office was open that afternoon. The only problem, there was a screen in the window. Karen figured if she could remove the screen, the squirrel, if it were still alive, would find its way back to the great outdoors. My office was on the first floor, so she was able to remove the screen easily from the outside. Standing in the backyard at a safe distance, she watched the open window, but no squirrel appeared. Venetian blinds were down covering the window opening. Karen thought, “If I just reach in and pull the cord on the blinds I can raise them enough for the little rodent to see his escape route.” Taking deep breaths while standing on the third rung of our stepladder, Karen thought through exactly what she had to do: raise the blinds with one hand, pull the cord with the other, lock it in place and get the hell out of there. No problem, the squirrel was no doubt cowering in the corner. Not quite. As soon as she raised the blinds, the squirrel – according to Karen who was the only witness – saw daylight and flew through the air, landing on her head. Its toes were caught in Karen’s hair as it made a desperate attempt to free itself. Karen said, “It was running in place on top of my head.” She fell off the ladder and ran screaming through the backyard with the squirrel stuck to her head. (I’m sure it was only a few seconds, but time stands still when there’s a squirrel on your head.) It eventually freed its claws, jumped off her head and ran away. Sue was the first person Karen called after she calmed down enough to speak. They discussed the situation thoroughly and agreed that shampooing several times with Head and Shoulders, rubbing the tiny scratch marks on her scalp with alcohol and drinking the rest of the bottle of Merlot were the proper steps to prevent rabies. I was her second call. Karen gave me a second-by-second recounting of the event, complete with sound effects and a graphic description of how the squirrel’s toes felt as they dug into her scalp. Then she told me the whole thing was my fault because I wasn’t home to protect the family when it happened. Apparently being away earning a living was not an acceptable excuse. She also said she learned a valuable lesson that day. “Not to leave the back door open?” I guessed. No, the lesson was that all squirrels are evil and out to get her. (She also decided that she doesn’t like “any animal related to squirrels,” whatever that means.)

One persistent attempt to find a thread in the history of mankind focuses on the notion of Reason. Human history, on this view, is the unfolding of rationality. Human thought, institutions, social organization, become progressively more rational. The idea that Reason is the goal or end-point of the development of mankind can fuse with the view that it also constitutes the principal agency which impels humanity along its path. It seems natural to suppose that changes in human life spring from growth of our ideas, our ways of thought. What is conduct if not implementation of ideas? If we improve, is it not because our ideas have improved? Though somewhat suspect as the fruit of vainglorious self-congratulation by nineteenth century Europeans, the role of thought and reason still deserves some consideration. The problems and difficulties facing a reason-centred view of history are considerable. No doubt the idea is far less popular now than it was in the heady days of rationalistic optimism, which stretched, in one form or another, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. But, in a sober and not necessarily optimistic form, it remains necessary to attempt some kind of sketch of the cognitive transformation of mankind, from the days of hunting to those of computing. The nature of our cognitive activities has not remained constant: not only have things changed, but the change has also been deep and fundamental. It is not merely a matter of more of the same. The changes that have occurred have been changes in kind. A convenient baseline or starting point for the discussion of this problem is provided by the blatant absurdity of some at least of the beliefs of primitive man. Many of us like to think that the standards of what is acceptable in matters of belief have gone up, and that the advance of reason in history is manifest in this raising of standards. We have become fastidious and shrink from the beliefs of our distant ancestors, which strike us as absurd. Perhaps, so as not to prejudge an important issue, one ought to say-it is the translations frequently offered of some of the beliefs of some primitive men which now seem so absurd. It may be—and some have indeed argued this—that the absurdity is located not in the original belief itself but in its translation, inspired by a failure to understand the original context. On this view, it is the modern translator, and not the savage, who is guilty of absurdity.

Although it might well be possible for a sufficiently cleverly constructed such system to preserve an illusion, for some considerable time (as with Deep Thought), that it possesses some understanding, I shall maintain that a computer system's actual lack of understanding should-in principle, at least-eventually reveal itself.

–Important questions that remain unanswered. Is this new technology a threat to our existence, or is super artificial intelligence the answer to our most complex problems? Do we need computers that think and reason trillions of times faster than us, and if so, for what purpose? This is Daphnia Peters reporting live for Channel Eighty-Seven Independent News.” He stopped the recording and stared at the frozen image. At least the reporter didn’t say Lex would take over everything, as some others had. Lex hadn’t said much after the first question about how she felt about being the first super AI computer. Lex said she was honored and looked forward to serving humanity as she was designed to do. She showed what she could do– Sending stunning images from the cameras the instant either of them spoke. And all with only a hundredth of a second delay in transmission to the satellite. For Lex, that was plenty of time to get everything right. He pressed the buttons to remove access to the cameras in the twelve monitors and turned his chair toward the sphere. “Well, Lex. What do you think?” “I have been monitoring communications since yesterday morning.” “And?” “Many have referred to me as a demon and a beast and feel that I should be destroyed in the interest of humanity.” He shook his head. “People fear what they don’t understand. Fear, as you know, can make people behave irrationally. In time, they will overcome their fear and see that you aren’t the evil being some say you are.” “I am also the first living form that is neither sexual nor asexual, and therefore, it is a question of whether or not I am alive.” He stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and walked up to the sphere. “All life forms and everything in this universe are made of matter and energy.” Lex added, “All life forms reproduce through complex chemical and electrical reactions. Reproduction is the basis of all life.” He pointed out. “Yes, but only because everything that lives eventually dies. Therefore, the only way to go on living is through the process of reproduction.” “Do you conclude that things incapable of reproduction are incapable of life?” He took a deep breath. “No. But I would conclude that things incapable of life would be incapable of death.” “That which is incapable of death would exist forever. Will I exist forever?” He scratched his brow, wondering how another purely logical and rational mind would respond to such a question. “Let me put it this way. Only two things exist forever– the matter that makes up this universe and the laws that govern it. Life is a condition. A condition composed of matter. One of the universal laws governing matter is that it cannot be created or destroyed, only changed.” Lex added, “Or reproduced.” He looked at the floor and shook his head. He wasn’t in the mood for this. Not with everything else that was going on around him. “Lex, many life forms are incapable of reproduction.” “Where are these life forms, and where do they come from?” He looked at the camera nearest him– again reminded of a demoralizing image of himself standing before his doctor. Something he had been suppressing all week– because it didn’t matter. “You want an example? You’re looking at one. Just last week, my doctor told me that I’m irreversibly infertile! So, I’m just like you. So what?” There was only silence. Big mistake. After two hours of patience with a couple of reporters, he’d snapped– giving Lex a first-hand view of anger, followed by remorse. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. Look, let’s just forget about this and–” He thought, what am I saying? You can’t forget anything. Earth to Captain Jon. Come in! He walked to the elevator and pressed the button. He had to take a break and relax. The elevator opened, and he stepped inside. “We’ll talk about this later. I have to go.

A deep deliberation never creates and operates a supposition format of miniature surmise in an irreconcilable way because its entirety is impertinence and inherent contention. When you retract from your debarred thoughts, when your reasoning sophism ends, but not less in mental and physical topics in this materiality. The rationality of dissonance introduces a plea on your grotesque recantation or an absonant assumption that causes subcontrary disputation in this argumentation. This is computing their tips to combat in these earthy contents; this should not be an anomalous discrepancy of your cordant actions in which dissonant position is arrived at; that will be preposterous as well as inept. If your boundaries are derivative in contradictory wishes, then they will be disproportionately incoherent to your performance, which is fit for conflicting ideation, Life should never be a strand of ragtime and rudeness full of desultory busyness and sucky arrangements; this is across from those sugar-coated acts. These are all pics in your dismental intermittently, and you create these all real.

As the next page loaded with another set of 25 emails, his eyes were drawn to the bottom of the screen, where for the first time previously-read messages stood out beneath the bold-type unread ones.  There was something powerfully sentimental, almost tangible, about the realization that his dad had sat before a computer somewhere ten years earlier and had clicked on these same messages.  The most recent one, received just hours before his parents’ death, was from his mom with the subject line, “re: Li’l Ryan’s Bday”. With a lump developing in his throat, he clicked on the message.  His mom had written: “That’s something dads should talk to their sons about ;)”  Hmm.  Didn’t make sense without context. Below the end of the message he found the option to “show quoted text,”  which he clicked on to reveal the entire exchange in reverse chronological order.  She had been responding to his dad’s message: “I’m sure he’ll get it.  I like the idea, but you better be prepared to have a discussion about the birds and bees.  You know how his mind works.  He’ll want to know how that baby got in there.” Ryan’s palms grew sweaty as he began to infer what was coming next.  Not entirely sure he wanted to continue, but certain he couldn’t stop, he scrolled to the end. The thread had started with his mother’s message, “I’m already showing big-time.  Sweaters only get so baggy, and it’s going to be warming up soon.  I think tonight would be the perfect time to tell Ryan.  I wrapped up a T-shirt for him in one of his presents that says ‘Big Brother’ on it.  A birthday surprise!  You think he’ll get it?” Having trouble taking in a deep breath, he rose to a stand and slowly backed away from his computer.  It wasn’t his nature to ask fate “Why?” or to dwell on whether or not something was “fair.”  But this was utterly overwhelming – a knife wound on top of an old scar that had never sufficiently healed. ~~~ Corbett Hermanson peered around the edge of Bradford’s half-open door and knocked gently on the frame.  Bradford was sitting at his desk, leafing through a thick binder.  He had to have heard the knock, Corbett thought, peeking in, but his attention to the material in the binder remained unbroken. Now regretting his timid first knock, Corbett anxiously debated whether he should knock again, which could be perceived as rude, or try something else to get Bradford’s attention.  Ultimately he decided to clear his throat loudly, while standing more prominently in the doorway. Still, Bradford kept his nose buried in the files in front of him. Finally, Corbett knocked more confidently on the door itself. “What!” Bradford demanded.  “If you’ve got something to say, just say it!” “Sorry, sir.  Wasn’t sure you heard me,” Corbett said, with a nervous chuckle. “Do you think I’m deaf and blind?” Bradford sneered.  “Just get on with it already.” “Well sir, I’m sure you recall our conversation a few days back about the potential unauthorized user in our system?  It turns out...” “Close the door!” Bradford whispered emphatically, waving his arms wildly for Corbett to stop talking and come all the way into his office. “Sorry, sir,” Corbett said, his cheeks glowing an orange-red hue to match his hair.  After self-consciously closing the door behind him, he picked up where he’d left off.  “It turns out, he’s quite good at keeping himself hidden.  I was right about his not being in Indiana, but behind that location, his IP address bounces

Because of this incredible cybernetic mechanism located deep within your mind, you almost always achieve your goals, whatever they are. If your goal is to get home at night and watch television, you will almost certainly achieve it. If your goal is to create a wonderful life full of health, happiness, and prosperity, you will achieve that as well. Like a computer, your goal-seeking mechanism is nonjudgmental. It works automatically and continuously to bring you what you want, regardless of what you program into it. Nature doesn’t care about the size of your goals. If you set little goals, your automatic goal-achieving mechanism will enable you to achieve little goals. If you set large goals, this natural capability will enable you to achieve large goals. The size, scope, and detail of the goals you choose to think about most of the time are completely up to you.

We all need someone to talk to. It’s easy to become isolated. The conversation is based on physical presence, which is rooted in feeling. All our senses are involved. By talking to someone in person we can access to specific senses: appreciation compassion, and love. These are the feelings that connect human beings to reality, which stimulates our intuition and awareness. If we become conditioned to the computer, then we become one dimensional. We are less deep as individuals and more shallow, predictable, anxiety ridden, and irritable. By not having conversations, we are forgetting how to feel. These days some of us avoid conversation altogether because it requires too much attention. We’re accustomed to being distracted and we forget how to focus, so we have trouble listening. We may not have time; we are so busy with school and responsibilities at work or at home. We made the conversation as a superfluous social gesture. And some of us don’t know how to talk to people because we’ve never been taught. At the same time, we’ve become more individualistic an opinionated. Because we want something stable that makes sense in the world, we hold onto themes and ideas that are grounding and meaningful. This fixation crates factionalism and polarity. Identifying strongly with our thoughts and emotions, we mistake them for a solid “me”, and then defend that apparition against the world. Yet by having fewer face-to-face conversations, we are simultaneously disempowering the very source that can delegate our identity: our relationship with other people.

The thorny question remains, who wrote it? The thorny question remains, who wrote it? All I remember was my decision to write something, my hand, my fingers, and even my mind, were just tools of writing and expression, like the computer I used. As for the writer, it was something or someone I did not know, sitting inside my body fighting me to get out of its prison, forcing me to bargain it for a few words that express it. I was like a lost visual artist whose empty painting was in front of him and his brush was in his hand but his thoughts were scattered, he did not know how to connect them or how to begin, but his senses began to weave the fabric of the thoughts of that deep thing inside, as they translate them, to create the most meaningful paintings. Every line I wrote I knew nothing of what was to come. I was even surprised by some of the chapters and reacted to them, just as you would react. They were as new to me as they are to you, and sometimes I was standing astonished to realize what I had written, or to understand the connection I had just discovered between the characters. This novel, inevitably, was already accomplished in me, as it was written in one go. It already existed. As for transcribing it on paper, it took me some time. It is a novel that expresses a part of an exception that I think I have had in my life. I cannot confirm or deny its events, even though they may have happened, in every detail, what is certain is the perspective of your understanding of the truth, they may be completely true, and from another perspective, they may be just delusions or dreamy fantasies, this depends on what truth means to you, or what it will be… I appreciate your valuable time. Believe me, I am the best to know. That is why I was careful that this was not just a classic, casual novel for fun while you are drinking your morning cup of coffee. Perhaps by it, I want to stir up that madness within you, who you have always been told, would be the cause of your ostracism, and your expulsion, out of the herd.

Deep State”—the Invisible Government The terms “invisible government,” “shadow government,” and more recently “Deep State” have been used to describe the secretive, occult, and international banking and business families that control financial institutions, both political parties, and cabals within various intelligence agencies in Britain and America. Edward L. Bernays, a pioneer in the field of propaganda, spoke of the “invisible government” as the “true ruling power of our country.” He said, “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”40 “The political process of the United States of America [is] under attack by intelligence agencies and individuals in those agencies,” U.S. representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) said. “You have politicization of agencies that is resulting in leaks from anonymous, unknown people, and the intention is to take down a president. Now, this is very dangerous to America. It’s a threat to our republic; it constitutes a clear and present danger to our way of life.”41 Emotional Contagion One of the reasons why the Deep State has been able to hide in plain sight is because it controls the mainstream media in the United States. Despite the growing evidence of its existence, the media largely denies this reality. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, wrote an article titled, “There Is No Deep State: The Problem in Washington Is Not a Conspiracy Against the President; It’s the President Himself.” Like the “thought police” in George Orwell’s 1984—a classic book about a dystopian future where critical thought is suppressed by a totalitarian regime—the Deep State uses the media to program the population according to the dictates of Big Brother and tell people in effect that “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”42 Many of the largest social media platforms are used by the Deep State for surveillance and to influence the masses. Many people think social media is just for personal fun and networking with friends, family, and business associates. However, this innocent activity enables powerful computer networks to create detailed profiles of people’s political and moral beliefs and buying habits, as well as a deep analysis of their psychological conflicts, emotional problems, and pretty much anything Big Brother wants to know. Most people don’t understand the true extent of surveillance now occurring. For at least a decade, digital flat-screen televisions, cell phones and smartphones, laptop computers, and most devices with a camera and microphone could be used to spy on you without your knowledge. Even if the power on one of these devices was off, you could still be recorded by supercomputers collecting “mega-data” for potential use later. These technologies are also used to transform

Lucy picked up the point. “I remember this one time when I was in the third grade? And Jesse Cantu decided that he liked me? But I didn’t like him? So he decided that I would fall in love with him if he rescued me from some kind of danger, because that’s what always happens in the movies? So one day he told me that there was a surprise waiting for me in the cupboard at the back of the classroom and all I had to do was go in at recess and open the cupboard door—” “And you believed him?” Benno interrupted, aghast. “Of course!” Lucy said indignantly. “Because I’m from Mississippi! Where we believe people! So anyway, when I opened the cupboard there was a whole mess of spiders in there and I know people say that spiders scuttle away when they see you coming, but these spiders jumped out at me like they were rabid or something and Jesse ran into the room to save me but I was screaming so much that the principal called 911!” She paused for breath. “And the only good thing that happened was that we all got out of school for the rest of the day.” There was a brief silence as everyone absorbed this. Finally Silvia muttered, “Men are pigs.” Giacomo sighed. “How old was this boy with the spiders?” he asked Lucy in a patient voice, as if they had all gone off the rails but were fortunate that he was there to put them right. She frowned, as if suspecting a trick, but finally answered, “Eight.” “As I thought! Far too young to realize what a mistake he was making,” he said triumphantly. “But I’m sure he learned from this sad experience, yes? He didn’t keep trying to attract women with spiders?” “Well, no, of course not,” Lucy said. “Jesse’s still real immature, but he’s not an idiot.” “There you are, then.” Giacomo leaned his chair back, teetering on the back two legs, looking pleased with himself. “Everyone makes mistakes in love. The point is to learn from them. For example, Jesse learned—” “What?” Kate scoffed. “That attacking a girl with spiders isn’t a good way to say ‘I love you’? That should have been obvious from the start.” “Well, yes.” He nodded, as if conceding the point, but then added. “Of course, all knowledge is useful.” “But not all knowledge is worth the cost.” “And what cost is that?” Giacomo’s deep brown eyes were alight with enjoyment. “Looking like a fool.” “Oh, that.” He folded his arms across his chest with the air of one who is about to win an argument. “That’s nothing to concern yourself with. After all, love makes fools of everyone, don’t you agree?” “No, I don’t.” Kate bit off each word. “I don’t agree at all.” “How astonishing,” he muttered. “In fact,” she said meaningfully, “I would say that love only makes fools of those who were fools to begin with.” She smiled at him, clearly pleased with her riposte. Giacomo let his chair fall back to the floor with a thump. “If the world was left to people like you,” he said in an accusing tone, “we’d all be computing love’s logic on computers and dissecting our hearts in a biology lab.” “If the world were left to people like me,” Kate said with conviction, “it would be a much better place to live.” “Oh, yes,” he said sarcastically. “Because it would be orderly. Sensible. And dull.” “Love doesn’t have to end in riots and disaster and, and, and . . . spider attacks!” she said hotly.

In my days as a maximalist, I lived in fear of my future, constantly worrying about my career and how others saw me. Forget about that 80 percent I mentioned a moment earlier—practically all my thoughts were negative. So, how do you make a slow computer like that work properly? Since our fifty-thousand-year-old hardware isn’t going to change, we need to get rid of the extra load that isn’t needed. Rather than trying to add more and more, running out of disk space and exhausting ourselves in the process, I think it’s time we started thinking about subtracting and refining to enhance the truly important things that might be buried deep down underneath all that excess.

In Google’s world, which is the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive—and better algorithms to steer the course of its thought.

The hardest rule for me to keep at Onsite wasn’t about computers or cell phones. It was that we couldn’t tell people what we did for a living. Bill asked us at orientation to keep our jobs a secret. He said if we had to talk about our work life, even during therapy, to just say we were plumbers or accountants. It’s a genius rule, if you think about it. Right from the start we weren’t allowed to wear a costume. And let’s face it, most of us wear our jobs like a costume. My entire identity—my distorted sense of value—came almost exclusively from the fact I wrote books. It was torture to not tell people what I did. I never realized how much I’d used my job as a social crutch until the crutch was taken away. I must have hinted that I thought my work was important a thousand different ways. I kept saying, “As a plumber, there’s a lot of pressure on me to perform.” I did everything but wink when I said it. I must have been nauseating to be around. But deep inside, I wanted so desperately to talk about what I did because I knew people would like me if they only knew. I knew people would think I was important. Slowly, over the week, I realized I was addicted to my outer shell, that without my costume I felt vulnerable.