On May 3, 1997, a chess match began between Deep Blue, a chess computer built by IBM, and Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion and possibly the best human player in history. Newsweek billed the match as “The Brain’s Last Stand.” On May 11, with the match tied at 2½–2½, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in the final game.
The media went berserk. The market capitalization of IBM increased by $18 billion overnight.
AI had, by all accounts, achieved a massive breakthrough.

S.R.

Intelligent machines with this capability would be able to look further into the future than humans can. They would also be able to take into account far more information. These two capabilities combined lead inevitably to better real-world decisions.
In any kind of conflict situation between humans and machines, we would quickly find, like Garry Kasparov and Lee Sedol, that our every move has been anticipated and blocked. We would lose the game before it even started.

S.R.

Alex Andreev, United Kingdom.

They had skies of pure azure and walls of fog moving in and out of the canyons with invisible feet, hills in winter of emerald green and in summer mountain upon mountain of pure gold. They had even more, for there was ever the unfathomable silence of the forest, the blazing immensity of the Pacific, days drenched with sun and nights spangled with stars.

H.M.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good — I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

M.D.

I will never draw my sword for another man again, or be dangled by another mans dream. From now on, I will fight my own battles.
― Guts, Berserk
― Kentarō Miura, Berserk, Vol. 1

Kentarō Miura (1966 – May 6, 2021)

Alas, the human race is not a single, rational entity. It is composed of nasty, envy-driven, irrational, inconsistent, unstable, computationally limited, complex, evolving, heterogeneous entities. Loads and loads of them. These issues are the staple diet—perhaps even raisons d’être—of the social sciences.

S.R.