THE MONKEY, THE BLACK SWAN, THE DEMON, AND THE AWAKENING MACHINE
If you believe you have already read everything there is to read about monkeys, demons, black swans, and artificial intelligence, this tale is here to inform you—ever so gently—that you most certainly have not. In it, a professor attempts to tame chance with a typewriter, a monkey suddenly decides to quote Blake, Maxwell’s demon materializes solely to humiliate your intuition about time, a black swan bursts through a window as though it owed explanations to no one, and an AI cobbled together from electronic scrap quietly resolves to turn the world into an experiment. If none of this strikes you as the least bit intriguing, perhaps you inhabit a different and far more predictable universe — but if you possess even a modest degree of curiosity, venture on: the worst that may happen is that you finish this reading with more questions than you began. Which, all things considered, is an excellent sign.