By Edo Segal
The question that broke my framework was not about machines. It was about neurons.
I had spent months building the river metaphor — intelligence as a force of nature, flowing from hydrogen to humanity to silicon. It organized my thinking. It gave shape to the vertigo. And then I encountered Blaise Agüera y Arcas asking a question so elementary it embarrassed me: What does a single neuron actually do?
A weighted sum and a binary decision. That is it. The most sophisticated neuron in your cortex and the most primitive neuron in a sea slug perform essentially the same computation. There is nothing in the operation of a single neuron that looks anything like thought.
And yet eighty-six billion of them produce
A reading-companion catalog of the 30 Orange Pill Wiki entries linked from this book — the people, ideas, works, and events that Blaise Aguera y Arcas — On AI uses as stepping stones for thinking through the AI revolution.
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