"what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. To determine that, he’ll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion."
I read it as somewhere between "skim" and "learn" - it's probably a term sama used himself in the interview. If you think of yourself as a machine it's probably a term than makes sense; it doesn't feel particularly aspirational to me :)
Yep -- this one puzzled me so much that I assumed I was in the wrong, because surely there's no way that a writer for the New Yorker would make a mistake that egregious. I must have read that sentence twenty times.
"what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. To determine that, he’ll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion."