Andrew Smart

Show me on this brain where Six Sigma hurt you.

Autopilot is a pop-science/manifesto, where Andrew Smart, a machine learning engineer with a background in neuroscience, argues that busyness is a curse, and that idleness is actually a necessary and useful part of being human. The book has a kind of freshman earnest intensity that overwhelms the argument. I'll buy that there is a resting network in the brain, that activates when we aren't thinking about or doing anything in particular, but I'm show more not sure that the converse, that activating this network leads to genius, is true. Certainly there's a way in which the managerial jargon of efficiency and always being on task is actually opposed to risk-taking and innovation, but while Smart is persuasive in criticizing Six Sigma in particular, his arguments drawing on Rilke are much less convincing, and the neuroscience comes in a gush of metaphors. show less

Beyond Zero and One is a very original and extraordinary book. Andrew Smart starts from the premise that if we wish to create an artificial intelligence of at least the human level, it will need to be endowed with consciousness.

To test whether an AI is indeed conscious, Smart proposes a variant of the Turing test, which he has baptized the Turing acid test. Smart is of the opinion that because psychedelic substances strongly change the conscious experience, we can use this notion to our show more advantage by giving an AI a digital equivalent of LSD.

The book shows us that there are mechanisms by which the normal flow of electrons in computer circuitry can be perturbed when hardware problems arise and when the voltage that usually represents the 0 or 1 gets stuck in between. Most interestingly when such glitches occur, software safety protocols based on "The Byzantine Generals Problem" still fail.

With Smart we make a journey through time from the inventor of binary calculation (Leibniz) to the implementation thereof in computer circuitry by Turing. We dive deeply into the realm of the subjective experience from Plato to Dehaene and Searle.

But most essentially the book is an inquiry into the nature of consciousness and a refreshing counter current in the prevailing hype that consciousness will one day be computed. As Smart lucidly shows in fact not even computers really "compute", although he does not exclude that consciousness might emerge in computers. Not only is virtual LSD proposed as a technique to test for the presence of consciousness in machines, Smart also argues that it may take away the edge of the potential AI "threat".

A visionary exploration beyond zero and one, which I genuinely enjoyed and wholeheartedly recommend! show less

Not the most accomplished book, but a great idea (a positive take on idleness) and a very nice critique of the "six sigma" management processes (seen as organizational "seizures").

Barrett Whitener