The Origin of this Title

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
  — T.S. Elliot, The Wasteland

Why call out Memory and Desire to label this blog’s posts? Put these qualities alongside
intelligence, the current darling of elite culture, and target of wide-ranging research in Artificial Intelligence. How often would you hear “I want my kids to be intelligent”, compared to “I want my kids to develop good Memories?”, or “to know the sources of their desire?” But Memory and Desire I maintain are more fundamental, and key to the mystery of our human nature. Heck, we already have a good idea how one can build a machine that’s intelligent.

About the Blogging Software

This blog runs on Jekyll and is hosted using the Jekyll engine that is part of GitHub. You can find out more about using Jekyll from the documentation at jekyllrb.com You can find the source code for Jekyll at github.com/jekyll/jekyll


About the Author

John Mark Agosta works in machine learning in the Bay Area.