Brian Christian Quotes

“To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.”

— Brian Christian

“When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on ice and gyrate crazily but do not fall, when I unconsciously counter-steer my way into a sharp bicycle turn, taking advantage of physics I do not understand using a technique I am not even aware of using, when I somehow catch the dropped oranges before I know I've dropped them, when my wounds heal in my ignorance, I realize how much bigger I am than I think I am. And how much more important, nine times out of ten, those lower-level processes are to my overall well-being than the higher-level ones that tend to be the ones getting me bent out of shape or making me feel disappointed or proud.”

— Brian Christian

“I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader ... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.”

— Brian Christian

“Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.”

— Brian Christian

“The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don't let them banalize you. Keep fighting.”

— Brian Christian

“What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time.”

— Brian Christian

“Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The games begins when it gets out of book, and it end when it goes into book..And this is why Game 6 [between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue] didn't count ... Tripping and falling into a well on your way to the field of battle is not the same thing as dying in it ... Deep Blue is only itself out of book; prior to that it is nothing. Just the ghosts of the game itself.”

— Brian Christian

“Many of my all-time favorite movies are almost entirely verbal. The entire plot of My Dinner with Andre is "Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory eat dinner." The entire plot of Before Sunrise is "Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around Vienna." But the dialogue takes us everywhere, and as Roger Ebert notes, of My Dinner with Andre, these films may be paradoxically among the most visually stimulating in the history of the cinema:”

— Brian Christian

“Existence without essence is very stressful.”

— Brian Christian

“Forrest Gander: Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of the usual off the tablecloth. To pay attention.”

— Brian Christian

“Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, (definable as) the art most susceptible to lossy compression.”

— Brian Christian

“And if you're just operating by habit, then you're not really living. -MY DINNER WITH ANDRE”

— Brian Christian

“Inspired by the punched railway tickets of the time, an inventor by the name of Herman Hollerith devised a system of punched manila cards to store information, and a machine, which he called the Hollerith Machine, to count and sort them. Hollerith was awarded a patent in 1889, and the government adopted the Hollerith Machine for the 1890 census. No one had ever seen anything like it. Wrote one awestruck observer, "The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the Gods, but beats them hollow as to speed." Another, however, reasoned that the invention was of limited use: "As no one will ever use it but governments, the inventor will not likely get very rich." This prediction, which Hollerith clipped and saved, would not prove entirely correct. Hollerith's firm merged with several others in 1911 to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. A few years later it was renamed-to International Business Machines, or IBM.”

— Brian Christian

A utopian future where we shed our bodies and upload our minds into computers and live forever, virtual, immortal, disembodied. Heaven for hackers.

— Brian Christian

Don't always consider all your options. Don't necessarily go for the outcome that seems best every time. Make a mess on occasion. Travel light. Let things wait. Trust your instincts and don't think too long. Relax. Toss a coin. Forgive, but don't forget. To thine own self be true. Living

— Brian Christian

“If you want to be a good intuitive Bayesian-if you want to naturally make good predictions, without having to think about what kind of prediction rule is appropriate-you need to protect your priors. Counterintuitively, that might mean turning off the news.”

— Brian Christian

“They would randomly assign patients to either ECMO or the conventional treatment until a prespecified number of deaths was observed in one of the groups. Then they would switch all the patients in the study to the more effective treatment of the two.”

— Brian Christian

“Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face.”

— Brian Christian

“As Trick points out, sports leagues aren't concerned with determining the rankings as quickly and expeditiously as possible. Instead, sports calendars are explicitly designed to maintain tension throughout the season, something that has rarely been a concern of sorting theory. For”

— Brian Christian

No choice recurs. We may get similar choices again, but never that exact one. Hesitation-inaction-is just as irrevocable as action. What the motorist, locked on the one-way road, is to space, we are to the fourth dimension: we truly pass this way but once.

— Brian Christian

“What's more, sports are not, of course, always designed strictly to minimize the number of games. Without remembering this, some aspects of sports scheduling would otherwise seem mysterious to a computer scientist.”

— Brian Christian

It is this same "central personal vision" that is crucial for Nietzsche, who goes so far as to say, "Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!" It is precisely the "central personal vision" of Lanier and "single taste" of Nietzsche that is lacking in most chatbots.

— Brian Christian

“What this also suggests, intriguingly, is that the task of translating (or writing) literary novels cannot be broken into parts and done by a succession of different humans either-not by wikis, nor crowdsourcing, nor ghostwriters. Stability of point of view and consistency of style are too important. What's truly strange, then, is the fact that we do seem to make a lot of art this way.”

— Brian Christian

“(As Harvard's Daniel Gilbert puts it, our future selves often "pay good money to remove the tattoos that we paid good money to get.")”

— Brian Christian

“In one particularly dramatic case, an officer instinctively grabbed the gun out of the hands of an assailant and then instinctively handed it right back-just as he had done time and time again with his trainers in practice. Detecting”

— Brian Christian

“Some of the biggest challenges faced by computers and human minds alike: how to manage finite space, finite time, limited attention, unknown unknowns, incomplete information, and an unforeseeable future; how to do so with grace and confidence; and how to do so in a community with others who are all simultaneously trying to do the same.”

— Brian Christian

“Meanwhile, the kale market grew by 40% in 2013 alone. The biggest purchaser of kale the year before had been Pizza Hut, which put it in their salad bars-as decoration. Some”

— Brian Christian

“Look-Then-Leap Rule: You set a predetermined amount of time for "looking"-that is, exploring your options, gathering data-in which you categorically don't choose anyone, no matter how impressive. After that point, you enter the "leap" phase, prepared to instantly commit to anyone who outshines the best applicant you saw in the look phase. We”

— Brian Christian

“As the applicant pool grows, the exact place to draw the line between looking and leaping settles to 37% of the pool, yielding the 37% Rule: look at the first 37% of the applicants,* choosing none, then be ready to leap for anyone better than all those you've seen so far.”

— Brian Christian

“Indeed, as Peter Whittle recounts, during World War II efforts to solve the question so sapped the energies and minds of Allied analysts  ... that the suggestion was made that the problem be dropped over Germany, as the ultimate instrument of intellectual sabotage.”

— Brian Christian

“During abusive conversations each remark after the first is only about the previous remark.
Verbal abuse is less complex than other forms of conversation! "Aware of their stateless, knee-jerk character, I recognize that the terse remark I want to blurt has far more to do with some kind of "reflex" to the very last sentence of the conversation than it does with either the actual issue at hand or the person I'm talking to ... I steer myself toward a more "stateful" response.”

— Brian Christian

“We asked Shoup if his research allows him to optimize his own commute, through the Los Angeles traffic to his office at UCLA. Does arguably the world's top expert on parking have some kind of secret weapon? He does: "I ride my bike." When”

— Brian Christian

“When Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether he should propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, he got out a pencil and paper and weighed every possible consequence. In favor of marriage he listed children, companionship, and the 'charms of music and female chit-chat.' Against marriage he listed the 'terrible loss of time,' lack of freedom to go where he wished, the burden of visiting relatives, the expense and anxiety provoked by children, the concern that 'perhaps my wife won't like London,' and having less money to spend on books. Weighing one column against the other produced a narrow margin of victory, and at the bottom Darwin scrawled, 'Marry-Marry-Marry Q.E.D.' Quod erat demonstrandum, the mathematical sign-off that Darwin himself restated in English: 'It being proved necessary to Marry.”

— Brian Christian