The importance of a book like “The industries of the future”1 by Alec Ross can hardly be overstated. By his own admission, “This book explores the industries that will drive the next 20 years of change to our economies and societies”… Read More ›
Learning
Il Dio dei matematici
Questa intervista al grandissimo Enrico Bombieri e’ molto profonda. A un certo punto B. dice: “Il Dio che viene dal pensiero di Gauss, così come il riferimento ‘il cielo stellato sopra di me’ di Kant, che pur non essendo un riferimento a Dio… Read More ›
Deflation of human agency
One of the premier Art Deco buildings in London, the famed Senate House (above) keeps resonating in my mind every time I wander inside it. Especially overnight. Vastly different in concept but equally capable of impressing with its geometry, the… Read More ›
“It is not important what we cover, but what you discover” (Victor Weisskopf)
Otium, in ancient Roman time, was the time productively spent pursuing the agenda of your personal growth – be it the cultivation of your garden or the virtuous studium of arts & science. This concept was clearly coming from the… Read More ›
“To enquire and to create”
There used to be an old concept in classical philosophy, the concept of the full and meaningful life, creative and inquisitive. German classical philosophy recovered that from the ancient Greek civilization, in particular from Ⅴ century Athens. Unfortunately, that was… Read More ›
Wiener on learning & Gödel
This is a marvellous paper by former colleague of Norbert Wiener, N. Levinson. The bibliography of his papers is here. “It is no coincidence that my first childish essay into philosophy,written when I was in high school and not yet… Read More ›
Engineering initial conditions (some words of thanks)
The human civilization stumbled first upon metric geometry (the Greeks), then it invented projective geometry (Italian Renaissance) and finally conquered topology (the XIX century), as the study of continuous transformations. See the master himself, here. The human being, in his/her… Read More ›
“What is the logical form of this?” on Sen, Gramsci, Sraffa and Wittgenstein
In a perceptive book, Ray Kurzweil, chief engineer at Google, and responsible for the Hidden Markov Model that stays behind much of today speech and text recognition software (like Siri), restates the position of the Logical Neopositivism as the following:… Read More ›
Grammars vs feedback control
There was a point in which the AI community adopted Chomsky grammars. Grammars are Cartesian universals. The other approach (N. Wiener) would have been to use feedback control system (later: stochastic control) to interpret learning. It did not happen. It… Read More ›
Arretratezza e folklore (Gramsci)
From “Quaderni del carcere”, by Antonio Gramsci Einaudi 2001, vol. II, pp. 1375-1395 (here). In the English translation: In acquiring one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a particular grouping which is that of all the social elements… Read More ›
rtraba 