Here is a list of the 37 books I’ve read this year:
1.The Quantum Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
2. Human Universe by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen
3. The Infinite Alphabet by César A. Hidalgo
4. The Wisdom Jesus by Cynthia Bourgeault
5. Life As No One Knows It by Sara Imari Walker
6. AI Engineering by Chip Huyen
7. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
8. Reality+ by David J. Chalmers
9. Mastering Transformers by Savaş Yıldırım, Meysam Asgari-Chenaghlu, and team
10. Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark
11. Conscious by Annaka Harris
12. Deep Medicine by Eric Topol
13. Hands-On Generative AI with Transformers and Diffusion Models by multiple authors
14. Why Machines Learn by Anil Ananthaswamy
15. These Strange New Minds by Christopher Summerfield
16. Seventeen Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart
17. Paradox by Jim Al-Khalili
18. Curious by Ian Leslie
19. Life Ascending by Nick Lane
20. Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
21. Forces of Nature by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen
22. Natural Language Processing with Transformers, Revised Edition by multiple authors
23. Universal by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
24. The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition by C.G. Jung and others
25. Every Life is on Fire by Jeremy England
26. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
27. Rise of the Machines by Thomas Rid
28. Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron
29. The Information by James Gleick
30. The Technological Republic by Nicholas W. Zermiska and Alexander C. Karp
31. The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman
32. The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
33. The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil
34. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
35. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming
36. Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell and others
37. How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend by Dr. Rachel V. Gow
Industry now leads academia in the digital age.
Where universities once shaped talent and set the pace, industry has taken over that role.
Today, it’s the people who use their knowledge to build real products, ship them, and deploy them into the world who gain the true competitive edge.
The gap between academia and industry will only widen. Academic curricula move slowly by nature; technology evolves too fast for institutions to keep up.
AI is redefining what the internet is for , accelerating us into a new era faster than most can comprehend.
The time to practice OPSEC has already passed; data centers already have everything — your banking details, biometrics, photos, conversations, movements.
We can blame social media, ignorance, or the absence of data-literacy… but the truth is We’re already here!
One day, a breach will come and those unprepared will lose far more than they ever imagined.😔
God speed.
‘The size of the universe is the distance that light can travel in 13.8 billion years. The size of the earth is a fraction of a light second. If we want to think about the universe is terms of space & time, the mind needs a different model of imagination.
Current models would struggle to grasp time from a psychological perspective. It requires exponential notation & abstract concepts to approximate these ideas of time & space.These massive factors difficult to comprehend do not equate to humans being insignificant to time & space on a cosmic scale.The mind is a beautiful model of cellular patterns and a vast amount of processing units. Despite being physically small in comparison to the dimensions of the universe, these units process approximately billions of thoughts in a human lifetime & that is not insignificant.’
Thoughts from Prof Frank Wilczek (Nobel Prize winning physicist at MIT) on The Lex Fridman Show.
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
Technology will develop and evolve with or without approval.
Both Forces of nature controlled by the hands of God that does not give a damn about human emotion.
Imagine someone can provide evidence by manipulating software to accuse you of a crime you’re innocent of…🫠
They’ve got digital footage, voice recordings and paid off a few people to lie about your case.
In some authoritarian countries, you’re guilty until proven innocent.
The global economy is built on these equations.
The way you project your Belief onto the world reflects your understanding of both the Belief and the world.
Nelson Mandela on Democracy
1994 Inaugural Address (Pretoria, South Africa)
“Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world. Let freedom reign. The sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement.”
‘The biggest miracle of the universe is a few pounds of moosh inside our skulls and yet it is one of the most complex objects in the universe.
Our brains are incredible, efficient and phenomenal machines.
Building Artificial Intelligence & comparing it to the human mind will unlock unique mysteries of the mind that we’ve pondered about since the dawn of time & humanity.
We will develop a better understanding of consciousness, dreaming, creativity & emotions.’
Thoughts from Demis hassabis exploring the exciting unknown frontier of Artificial Intelligence on The Lex Fridman podcast, episode 299 dated 01 July 2022
Human beings discrediting the intelligence of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is akin to Monkeys in lab coats judging a toddler figuring out how to peel a banana.
AI is the worse it will be today because it will only get better tomorrow.
There will be a generation native to decentralized technologies, AI, robotics and quantum that will study present reality through a historical lens and be absolutely aghast that humans would burn & cut down trees to communicate & transfer daily information.
They may romanticize the tactile nature of our methods like holding a book or feeling the grain of paper as a lost art much like we cherish vinyl records or Polaroids. Still, their lens will be shaped by their own tech’s limits which future generations might too find primitive.
On July 13th 1958 , The New York Times reported on ‘The Perceptron’ an electronic device that could mimic the human brain. It introduced the foundational concept of neural networks & machine learning. It could learn & compute but only in a very narrow mathematical sense.
When studying mathematics & specifically differential calculus one would ponder ‘why’ the functions do what they do? This exercise, despite beneficial for the brain distracted the mind from solving the equation. You don’t have to understand how a tool works to use the tool.
History has repeatedly shown the same pattern for innovative & disruptive technologies.When new tools enter the free market that threaten the monopolistic power structure,the no1 tactic to discourage its use by the market participant is psychological warfare in the form of ‘FUD’.
New tech always faces FUD:
🚂 Railroads/Autos → unsafe & disruptive
⚡ Electricity → deadly, fire risk
🌐 Internet → scam, fad, useless
🤖 AI → job killer, existential threat
Human Intelligence & Artificial Intelligence both process information.
Processing information is a form of computation that occurs biologically in wetware or artificially in software. The substrate and mechanism for each differs but falls on the spectrum of “thinking”.
The notion can be analogized to how an analogue & digital watch tracks time via different substrate and mechanisms however both function as tools to keep time & both are labeled as watches.
When a human being looks at an object, he/she labels the object with regard to its appearance, how it stimulates the senses and its utility. Despite this, the human does not need to know what the object is fundamentally made of, to derive meaning from its macro-state.
A computer is able to assess the structure of a sequence of numbers, words or characters and derive meaning from the positioning of these elements (items, tokens or complex objects) in the sequence without ‘knowing’ what the element fundamentally is.
Consciousness and Computers approach understanding in different but oddly parallel ways.
If consciousness had access to all knowledge & understanding of the universe it would see that every system and structure in physical reality can be compressed & expressed through geometrical patterns & mathematical algorithms.
Never stop using your imagination,curiosity & intuition to question the algorithms & patterns that shape your human experience & awareness of the world. Is it adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing your soul.
“The area that AI is having the most impact in education is not in the classroom but outside it. It equalizes access for all children to “adult” support. There are many students in the world who do not have access to a quality teacher, private tutors or parents that can help.
Now with an AI companion, every student can receive encouragement, feedback on their homework & writing with assistance tackling difficult questions.”
OpenAI’s Head of Education, Leah Belsky
The problem with most people is they only perceive and conceptualize from their own perspective. You might not need new technology but many do. Somewhere, there are innocent humans in settlements without running water or electricity. For them, innovation isn’t a luxury; it’s empowerment. It’s a chance to participate on the global stage of human progress. For those shackled by poverty and hardship not of their own doing, technology can mean hope.
Technology is a cyclic tool that interacts with every facet of civilization (religion, culture, science, language, economics, mathematics etc). Unfortunately entities have risen in civilization through the ages via coercion and manipulative strategies to capture Technology and use it as a tool for personal benefit and push certain agendas at the expense of the many throwing off balance between Chaos & Order.This is slowly changing as advancements in human ingenuity return technology back to the people.
Vivat libertas🫶