How Much Does One Imagine

How much does one imagine, how much observe?  One can no more separate those functions than divide light from air, or wetness from water.

-- Elspeth Joscelin Huxley CBE (1907 - 1997), English writer, magistrate, and government adviser, The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) Ch. 15

Market Incentives

It's easy to conflate technology problems with capitalism problems. Back in 2021, science-fiction writer and AI commentator Ted Chiang said that "most fears about AI are best understood as fears about capitalism."  It's not the tech per se; it's who controls it and how it could be used against us.

Imagine an AI assistant for a doctor.  We can imagine it affecting the profession in one of two ways.  The AI could give a doctor more time to do the human parts of their job: to spend more time with their patients, to listen more closely to their needs, to explain things more fully.  Or the managers of the medical practice could give that doctor five times the patients -- and fire the other four.  Which way it would go is not a question of technology.  It's a question of market incentives.

-- Nathan Sanders & Bruce Schneier, "Separating AI's Technological Problems From its Capitalism Problems" at TechPolicy.press (11 August 2026)

A Great Aptitude

Genius is nothing else than a great aptitude for patience.

-- Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707 - 1788), French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and author, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Once A Year

Everyone is a genius at least once a year.  The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799), German scientist, satirist, and philosopher, Aphorisms (1779-1788)

I Cannot Be Sure

I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I'm right and he is wrong.

-- Milton Friedman (1912 - 2006), American economist, "Say 'No' to Intolerance", Liberty magazine, vol. 4, no. 6, (July 1991) pp. 17-20

In-Between Moments

I do a lot of my best thinking in those kind of in-between moments that people now fill with online activity.

-- Christopher Nolan CBE (1970 -), British-American film director, producer, and screenwriter, "Christopher Nolan explains why he doesn't have a smartphone" at People.com (15 July 2023)

One Who Allows Art

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.  The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him.

-- Carl Gustav Jung (1875 - 1961), Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, from his essay "Psychology and Literature" (1930)