p.99 increasingly, humans are coming to value the abilities of their machines more highly than their own.
p.120 In a contest between evolution and human brains it is not wise to bet on brains.
p.125 there are limits to the knowledge and power that human beings can muster for any purpose.
p.125-126 there are limits imposed by our inability to know the future, to make accurate
long-range predictions. This is a theoretical and unalterable limit based on the great complexity and uncertainty
of the interacting events that will determine the future, and on the catalytic influence on the future of seemingly
minute and trivial happenings in the present.
p.126 there is a limit, an especially frustrating one, that is described by the maximization theory of von
Neumann and Morgenstern, which says in effect that in a complex world we cannot work everything out for the best simultaneously.
This... limit is why evolution has proven more reliable than our substitutes for it. Evolution
is slow and wasteful, but it has resulted in an infinity of working, flexible compromises, whose success is constantly
tested by life itself... Our most glittering improvements over Nature are too often a fool's solution to a problem
p.128 I have no desire to present an entirely sour view of humankind or to leave the impression that I believe
all of our recent works are utter failures. But the successes are isolated and run counter to the trend, and they are adequately
celebrated in a myriad of other books by other authors. It is now more important to remind the world of our failures, and
if we succeed in this, there will be time later for appropriate pride. [JLJ - Mr. Gloomy, aren't we?]
p.150 Dreyfus concludes that the strange optimism of the workers in the field of Artificial Intelligence
is based on their belief "that human and mechanical information processing ultimately involves the same elementary processes."
p.170 Phaedrus remembered a line from Thoreau: "You never gain something but that you lose something."
p.223 Freud's remarkable discovery that the unconscious mind that appears in dreams is present and active
during the waking state and is responsible for a great deal of our behavior.
p.235 optimism is necessary for those who are attempting the impossible; they could not continue to function
without it.
