Quotes from David Weinberger

Knowledge in the Internet Age - networked knowledge - is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it's provisional; it's a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved.

The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent.

the next darwin is more likely to be a data wonk than a naturalist wandering through an exotic landscape

The Internet's abundant capacity has removed the old artificial constraints on publishing—including getting our content checked and verified. The new strategy of publishing everything we find out thus results in an immense cloud of data, free of theory, published before verified, and available to anyone with an Internet connection. And this is changing the role that facts have played as the foundation of knowledge.

Our task is to learn how to build smart rooms—that is, how to build networks that make us smarter, especially since, when done badly, networks can make us distressingly stupider.

Transform the medium by which we develop, preserve, and communicate knowledge, and we transform knowledge.

Science had been a type of publishing and now it is becoming a network.

AI in the form of machine learning, and especially deep learning, is letting us benefit from data we used to exclude as too vast, messy, and trivial.

After just three days, the system so mastered the game that it was able to beat the prior version of AlphaGo a hundred games out of a hundred.

But for the want of a nail, a kingdom was lost

Iniziamo a essere credibili nel momento in cui siamo trasparenti e ammettiamo di essere non infallibili.

We don't use these technologies because they are huge, connected, and complex. We use them because they work.

The mall owes its existence to Level II complexity: malls weren't feasible before there were cars, yet you could not predict their rise just by examining a car.

Yet about an AlphaGo move that left some commenters literally speechless, one go master, Fan Hui, said, "It's not a human move. I've never seen a human play this move." Then, softly, "So beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

Volunteers transcribed sixty thousand words—the length of a short book—from old manuscripts to create what in machine learning language is called ground truth:

in this way, artificial neural networks are like the brain's very real neural network. These networks can be insanely complicated.

Our newly capacious machines can get closer to understanding it than we can, and they, as machines, don't really understand anything at all.

Evolution has given us minds tuned for survival and only incidentally for truth.

how we predict shows us how we think the future happens and thus how the world works.

For three thousand years, the Egyptians held to a cyclical view that year after year proved itself to be true: the seasons came and went, life in the farms and villages remained basically the same, and the idea of progress was as foreign as soft-serve ice cream.

In fact, it's entirely plausible that the factors affecting people's preferences are microscopic and fleeting.

On the other hand, Clairaut reported that Lepaute exhibited an "ardor" that was "surprising"—perhaps surprising to him because Lepaute was a woman; he later removed the acknowledgment of Lepaute's considerable contribution from the published text. (Much of her later work was published without attribution by other people, including her husband, France's royal clockmaker.)

I've learned the dangerous lesson of the web: You succeed by giving up control, and that's inverse of the normal campaign.

Metadata liberates us, liberates knowledge.