CHAPTER 6

"The New Mind Readers"

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anti-immigration riots roiled the city of Chemnitz: See "Merkel condemns xenophobic riots after killing of German man: Chancellor says far-right protests in eastern city of Chemnitz 'have no place in our country,'" The Guardian, 27 August 2018.

a senior research scientist named Jack Poulson felt compelled to resign: "Google whistleblower launches project to keep tech ethical: Jack Poulson's non-profit group Tech Inquiry aims to make it easier for coders to speak out," The Guardian, 13 July 2019.

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Computer Addiction: Reflections on a New Obsession: Psychology Today, August 1980. As far as I can tell this piece doesn't live online—I had to find an old copy for sale.

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"Nature never draws a line without smudging it": The fuller Churchill quote is yet more germane: "The world, nature, human beings, do not move like machines. The edges are never clear-cut, but always frayed. Nature never draws a line without smudging it."

her classic accounting of the trade, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents: Close to the Machine is a terrific book, by a programmer who began as an English major in the 1970s. First published in 1997, it was republished in 2012 with an introduction by Jaron Lanier, to justified acclaim. Unflinching and penetrating, it is an entertaining and easy read for coder and non-coder alike and comes highly recommended.

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the signal reaches that neighbor neuron at best 50 percent of the time: from "Stochastic resonance in Hodgkin-Huxley neuron induced by unreliable synaptic transmission", Guo et al, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Volume 308, 7 September 2012: "Several previous experimental studies have found that the successful rate of a postsynaptic neuron responding to the presynaptic spike input is typically less than fifty percent (Allen and Stevens, 1994, Branco and Staras, 2009, Rosenmund et al., 1993, Stevens and Wang, 1995). Furthermore, through numerical simulations, some researchers have also proposed that the unreliability of synaptic transmission might be a part of information processing of the brain and possibly have functional roles in neural computation. For instance, it has been found that synapses with suitable unreliability can improve information transmission efficiency (Goldman, 2004), filter redundancy neural information (Goldman et al., 2004), enrich dynamical behaviors of neuronal networks (Friedrich and Kinzel, 2009, Kinzel, 2007), enhance signal propagation capability in feedforward neuronal networks (Guo and Li, 2011), lead to energy-efficient neural computation (Levy and Baxter, 2002), as well as improve performance in a sequence learning model of hippocampal neurons (Sullivan and Levy, 2003)."