The next major revolution was not technological, but organizational. - Gary F. Marcus

Honey bees, too, use a highly specialized learning mechanism to help them figure out where they are going: the difference is that their system works based on the trajectory of a single star, our very own sun. Once again, part of the system is prewired, but part of it requires learning. The prewired bit is a mathematical function that relates the sun's position on the horizon to to a bee's orientation-but some of the values of the equation must be set, which is where learning comes in. What the bee learns is a highly specific bit of information about the sun's trajectory at the bee's particular latitude at a particular time of year. A five o'clock winter sun in Boston means something very different from a five o'clock summer sun in California, and a highly focused learning mechanism allows honeybees to take advantage of that information. We know that bees don't simply memorize a correspondence between particular places on the horizon and particular headings, because bees that have been raised in conditions in which they are exposed only to morning light can accurately use the sun as a guide during evening light.

"Repetition sometimes works in poetry, but rarely in prose. The musical provocateur John Cage once wrote a lecture in which a single page was repeated fourteen times, with the refrain "If anybody is sleep let him go to sleep" (Cage, 1961). Midway through, the artist Jean Reynal stood up and screamed, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute.

But the real story is how narrow Duplex was. For all the fantastic resources of Google (and its parent company, Alphabet), the system that they created was so narrow it could handle just three things: restaurant reservations, hair salon appointments, and the opening hours of a few selected businesses. By the time the demo was publicly released, on Android phones, even the hair salon appointments and the opening hour queries were gone. Some of the world’s best minds in AI, using some of the biggest clusters of computers in the world, had produced a special-purpose gadget for making nothing but restaurant reservations. It doesn’t get narrower than that.