Pyongyang was also in the house. The North Korean delegate had produced an astonishing speech, essentially arguing that Palestine should follow their example, complete with a “credible nuclear deterrent.” Later on in the corridors I saluted the delegation, and they saluted back. No chance of a bilateral though to expand on the unclear points surrounding Kim Jong-nam’s assassination.

the story of the Copernican Revolution shows that science was, from its birth, a dynamic process, with good points and bad points on both sides of the debate. Not until decades after Kepler’s On the New Star and Locher and Scheiner’s Mathematical Disquisitions did astronomers begin to come upon evidence suggesting that the star sizes they were measuring, either with the eye or with early telescopes, were a spurious optical effect, and that stars did not need to be so large in a Copernican universe.

We have to equip machines with a model of the environment. If a machine does not have a model of reality, you cannot expect the machine to behave intelligently in that reality. The first step, one that will take place in maybe 10 years, is that conceptual models of reality will be programmed by humans.

The next step will be that machines will postulate such models on their own and will verify and refine them based on empirical evidence. That is what happened to science; we started with a geocentric model, with circles and epicycles, and ended up with a heliocentric model with its ellipses.

Robots, too, will communicate with each other and will translate this hypothetical world, this wild world, of metaphorical models.