Powerful Ideas Dealt with in the Book
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
—Pablo Picasso
The approach to the dialogues in this book focuses on this principle: the reality is much more complex and less certain than before, with more possibilities. It can bring about more questions than answers. In other words, the best responses are those that generate more questions. These new questions turn out to be more important than the answers.
Some powerful and thought-provoking ideas dealt with in the book are as follows:
- What is intelligence, how does it work, where does it reside, and how is it measured?
- Alvaro Pascual-Leone / José Hernández-Orallo / Ricardo Baeza-Yates / Javier Echeverria
- What will intelligent machines be like? Will there be nonbiological intelligence (not based on Homo sapiens)?
- Michail Bletsas / José Hernández-Orallo / Sara Seager
- What will happen with global warming?
- Mario J. Molina / Avelino Corma
- How far should our commitment go to economizing energy and minimizing its use?
- Avelino Corma / Mario J. Molina / Alejandro W. Rodriguez
- Has Moore’s law come to an end? Is graphene the answer?
- Pablo Jarillo-Herrero / Ignacio Cirac / Anne Margulies
- How does the brain really work? Where is the “I”?
- Alvaro Pascual-Leone / José Hernández-Orallo
- Where does consciousness reside and how does it emerge?
- Alvaro Pascual-Leone / Javier Echeverria
- Are we deterministic and are we determined? Is human behavior determined or do we have free will?
- Ignacio Cirac / Javier Echeverria / Alvaro Pascual-Leone / Ricardo Baeza-Yates
- Is the universe a hologram? What happens to dark matter?
- Javier Echeverria / José Bernabéu
- What causes behavior in humans? In robots?
- Alvaro Pascual-Leone / Michail Bletsas / Rosalind W. Picard
- What is going to happen with learning and universities, and what role will they play in society? What will the best model be? What values will they have? What should an efficient university be like nowadays?
- Hal Abelson / Israel Ruiz / Anne Margulies
- Is convergence technology also a matter of culture?
- How should technology be integrated into learning?
- Anne Margulies / Hal Abelson / Henry Jenkins
- Are we going to become bionic? To what extent?
- Is technology modifying human perception? How should it engage with our cognitive system?
- Hiroshi Ishii / Michail Bletsas / Javier Echeverria
- Should we use technology only as manufacturers wish? Should technology be designed to force us to do so?
- Is our relationship with technology changing the “settings” of our senses?
- Hiroshi Ishii / Michail Bletsas / Rosalind W. Picard / Howard Rheingold
- Is the breaking of the symmetry between a movement and its reversal-in-time observed in particle physics?
- Can ethics combined with open knowledge create a sustainable economy of ideas?
- John Perry Barlow / Michail Bletsas / Hal Abelson
- Have we come to see the final unknown particle?
- Why is nature quantum, yet our logic won’t accept it? Is computing going to become quantum? Will we see quantum computers as a normal part of our lives?
- Ignacio Cirac / Pablo Jarillo-Herrero / Alejandro W. Rodriguez
- Why does mass exist? Does anything lie beyond the Higgs boson?
- Is it possible to govern uncertainty and live with their stochastic effects? Can we plan the impossible?
- Will there ever be a “completed work”?
- Is the semantic web going to make everything that is implicit clearly explicit? How is rendering knowledge on the Internet going to evolve?
- Bernardo Cuenca / José Hernández-Orallo / Ricardo Baeza-Yates
- Are search technologies now allowing us to remember the future?
- Is it important to have a free and open Internet?
- Has the impact of the Web come to maturity? Is Web 3.0 the mobile Internet, the Semantic Web? The Internet of Things? The Internet of Everything? Will there be a definitive Web?
- Tim O’Reilly / Ricardo Baeza-Yates / Bebo White
- Could the universe of the great “connected brain” of the Web finally turn out to be the “cement” that leads us back to a period of understanding human knowledge as a whole?
- Is the change brought about by quantum physics much greater than that brought about by the theory of relativity?
- Ignacio Cirac / Pablo Jarillo-Herrero
- Encryption and decryption: should the “right to encode” personal communication be viewed as a human right?
- David Casacuberta / Michail Bletsas / José Hernández-Orallo
- Is reality much more open than the mathematics that tries to explain it?
- Is the expression “affective computing” an oxymoron?
- Will nanotechnology change our operational frameworks in a way that we are unable to imagine?
- Will we be able to discover another earth different from our own during our lifetime?
- Beauty ≠ truth? Can we contradict John Keats?
- In art, can we go back to the past and change it?
- Is it possible to paint the void?