James Cham tweeted a gem: "Buried at the end of George Dyson's discursive and fascinating book on analog computing … is this terrific cybernetics-flavored proposal for three laws of artificial intelligence."

"There are three laws of artificial intelligence. The first, known as Ashby's law of requisite variety after the cybernetician W. Ross Ashby, author of Design for a Brain, states that any effective control system must be as complex as the system it controls.

The second law, articulated by John von Neumann, states that the defining characteristic of a complex system is that it constitutes its own simplest behavioral description. The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself. Trying to reduce the system's behavior to a formal description, such as an algorithm, makes things more complicated, not less.^[ed]

The third law states that any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand."