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Susanna and the elders,
By Artemisia Gentileschi

Judith and her Maidservant,
By Artemisia Gentileschi

Judith has goiter

What could be further from our age than the strange claim of a Leonardo to whom painting was a supreme goal and the ultimate demonstration of all knowledge? Leonardo was convinced that painting demanded universal knowledge, and he did not even shrink from a theoretical analysis which to us is stunning because of its very depth and precision.

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The anatomy of melancholy

I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy.

- Robert Burton's anatomy of melancholy

German: Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir

English: Of the deepest distress, I cry out to you

Larry Page likes to imagine that he never escaped academia. Google, after all, began as a doctoral dissertation—and the inspiration for the search engine came from his connoisseurship of academic papers. As the son of a professor, he knew how researchers judge their own work. They look at the number of times it gets cited by other papers. His eureka moment arrived when he saw how the Web mimicked the professoriate. Links were just like citations—both were, in their way, a form of recommendation. The utility of a Web page could be judged by tabulating the number of links it received on other pages. When he captured this insight in an algorithm, he punningly named it for himself: PageRank. (The algorithm used by Google)

- World Without Mind

In 2002, Google decided to digitize every book in existence [and create the largest library in history].
When the historian George Dyson visited the Googleplex to give a talk, an engineer casually admitted, “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” If that’s true, then it’s easier to understand Google’s secrecy. The world’s greatest collection of knowledge was mere grist to train machines, a sacrifice for the singularity.

- World Without Mind

For centuries, engineers automated physical labor; our new engineering elite has automated thought. They have perfected technologies that take over intellectual processes, that render the brain redundant [...] Indeed, we have begun to outsource our intellectual work to companies that suggest what we should learn, the topics we should consider, and the items we ought to buy. These companies can justify their incursions into our lives with the very arguments that Saint-Simon and Comte articulated: They are supplying us with efficiency; they are imposing order on human life.

- World Without Mind

The algorithm was developed in order to automate thinking, to remove difficult decisions from the hands of humans, to settle contentious debates.

- World Without Mind