This is a lesswrong quote, but I think it belongs in this discussion because it’s remarkably apropos:
I remember when I finally picked up and started reading through my
copy of the Feynman Lectures on Physics, even though I couldn’t
think of any realistic excuse for how this was going to help my AI
work, because I just got fed up with not knowing physics. And -
you can guess how this story ends—it gave me a new way of looking
at the world, which all my earlier reading in popular physics
(including Feynman’s QED) hadn’t done. Did that help inspire my AI
research? Hell yes. (Though it’s a good thing I studied
neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, Bayes,
and physics in that order—physics alone would have been
terrible inspiration for AI research.)
This is a lesswrong quote, but I think it belongs in this discussion because it’s remarkably apropos:
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky