I was just reading a Wired article about the deaths of two AI researchers:  Chris McKinstry and Pushpinder Singh.  Both were working on strong AI (or at least, had the hope of it).  Both committed suicide and did it within a month of each other.  McKinstry claimed that his system would be aware in a short time.  If GAC ever became aware, it has vanished into the cloud.  So all very interesting and I recommend the article.  Not if you want a serious read about the topics they researched, but it presents an interesting narrative of two lives with eerie parallels.

What inspired this post is a minor quibble about a word that many English speakers have surely heard:  Wunderkind.  In German, it literally means “wonder child” and is often applied in English to a child prodigy or a young person whose star is on the rise.  Here is an excerpt from the Wired article:

Push, as everyone called him, had also taught himself to code — first on a VIC-20, then by making computer games for an Amiga and an Apple IIe. His father, Mahender, a topographer and mapmaker who had studied advanced mathematics, encouraged the wüenderkind. Singh was brilliant, ambitious, and strong-willed. In ninth grade, he had created his own sound digitizer and taught it to play a song he was supposed to be practicing for his piano lessons. “I don’t want to learn piano anymore, I want to learn this,” he said. [emphasis mine]

When you have a German vowel with an umlaut, it is rendered in English orthography as the vowel + e.  So ü would be written in English as ue.  Wunderkind has no umlaut in German, so this would not be necessary.  Plus, you wouldn’t have to add the e anyway since they already included the umlaut.  Shoddy editorial work, but it made me lol.