[xxxyy]

I find his thoughts about the potential limits of humanity provocative and really clever. These three parts made great impression on me:

> And in fact, you could argue that the reason why we’ve generated computational devices is consciously or unconsciously, we’ve come to recognize that our endogenous, organic computing power is not up to the task and we have to recruit machines to represent culture, because we cannot. I think there’s good evidence for that.

> The atom bomb, for example, forced a crisis. We had an extraordinary power and we didn’t really have the moral probity or sophistication to deal with it. We still do not. And that’s not making a judgment about whether our actions were right or wrong; it’s just that I think thinking reasonably about how to deploy power on that scale is beyond us.

> Human beings are hardware that’s about 100,000 years old, but we run string theory, Lie algebra. We’re running 21st-century software! How is it possible that old, antiquated hardware can continue to run ever newer and more complex cultural software?

[ihm]

Interestingly enough the "mental software" used to handle the crisis of the atom bomb came from mathematics (von Neumann's game theory, in particular the idea of mutually assured destruction) rather than moral philosophy or something which we label as "humanities". I'd probably argue that what von Neumann was doing with MAD was "humanities" but I don't have a good definition of the word.