But I think we're so far away from that, and so far away from anything being dangerous or sentient, that we need to do a lot more work first before we can properly analyse what the dangers might be".
For me, it is Blackwood's idea of nature as sentient that dazzles - even more than his weird tales of psychic detectives and retributive ghosts and ancient demons summoned by old words and spells.
In the latter category, we witnessed Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, claim, in all seriousness, that in current-day New York "every citizen knew, who was in any way sentient, that the most important danger in the city is not the yellow cabs, it's the cyclists".
In his first book, LAWRENCE BOOTH'S BOOK OF VISIONS (Yale University, cloth, $19; paper, $12), Maurice Manning displays not just terrific cunning but terrific aim -- he nails his images the way a restless boy, up in a tree with a slingshot, nails anything sentient that wanders into view.
Some of these are just so seemingly sentient that I wouldn't be surprised if there's some degree of human assistance in the mix — but really, I suppose that's bound to happen.
High: Are there other companies you keep an eye on that you think are doing some interesting things, like Google's TensorFlow, Microsoft's Big Sur computation network, toolkit, etc. Are there AI developments within large companies, or companies that are focused exclusively on it (e.g., Sentient) that you are keeping your pulse on?
