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Glass Beads

A string of thematic histories in search of a thesis.

There are a lot of conflicting accounts of that story—as near as I can tell from googling, Dutch traders almost certainly gave seven people about $1000 worth of trade goods, which could plausibly have included glass beads thrown in as extras, in exchange for some sort of promise. In the fifties and sixties, Mitchie had an idea for a prototype of what techies today call “convolutional neural networks”—the foundation of the machine learning process responsible for most modern AI. We follow a young man, Erasmas, in a monastic community in an alternate world, a mostly-cloistered campus engaged in what we would call religion, art, science, and philosophy (they slice these concepts up differently).

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