quotations about artificial intelligence
Our ultimate objective is to make programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do. We shall ... say that a program has common sense if it automatically deduces for itself a sufficient wide class of immediate consequences of anything it is told and what it already knows.
JOHN MCCARTHY
"Programs with Common Sense", 1958
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY
Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk
There's all this excitement about AI and it's well deserved. AI is a practical tool for the first time and that's great. There's good reason for companies to put in all of this money. But just look for example at a driverless car, that's a form of intelligence, modest intelligence, the average 16-year-old can do it as long as they're sober, with a couple of months of training. Yet Google has worked on it for seven years and their car still can only drive -- as far as I can tell since they don't publish the data -- like on sunny days, without too much traffic.
GARY MARCUS
"Discussing the limits of artificial intelligence", Tech Crunch, April 1, 2017
You're not even going to notice the takeover. Next time you're in a supermarket, give the self-service checkout a hard stare. It's essentially a static robot. And this robot has human assistants. Those people who turn up when you attempt to buy alcohol are summoned by the machine.
MICHAEL BROOKS
"What is the future of artificial intelligence?", New Statesman, March 18, 2016
Today's AI is about new ways of connecting people to computers, people to knowledge, people to the physical world, and people to people.
PATRICK WINSTON
MIT AI Lab briefing, 1997
As always, there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news is, we seem incapable of solving our more pressing or persistent problems. The good news is, we're getting closer to building a machine that might do it for us.
JIM VIBERT
"If artificial intelligence is the answer, what's the question?", The Chronicle Herald, January 1, 2018
The deep paradox uncovered by AI research: the only way to deal efficiently with very complex problems is to move away from pure logic.... Most of the time, reaching the right decision requires little reasoning.... Expert systems are, thus, not about reasoning: they are about knowing.... Reasoning takes time, so we try to do it as seldom as possible. Instead we store the results of our reasoning for later reference.
DANIEL CREVIER
AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence
Computers already undergrid our financial system, and our civil infrastructure of energy, water, and transportation. Computers are at home in our hospitals, cars, and appliances. Many of these computers, such as those running buy-sell algorithms on Wall Street, work autonomously with no human guidance. The price of all the labor-saving conveniences and diversions computers provide is dependency. We get more dependent every day. So far it's been painless. But artificial intelligence brings computers to life and turns them into something else. If it's inevitable that machines will make our decisions, then when will the machines get this power, and will they get it with our compliance?.... Some scientists argue that the takeover will be friendly and collaborative--a handover rather than a takeover. It will happen incrementally, so only troublemakers will balk, while the rest of us won't question the improvements to life that will come from having something immeasurably more intelligent decide what's best for us. Also, the superintelligent AI or AIs that ultimately gain control might be one or more augmented humans, or a human's downloaded, supercharged brain, and not cold, inhuman robots. So their authority will be easier to swallow. The handover to machines described by some scientists is virtually indistinguishable from the one you and I are taking part in right now--gradual, painless, fun.
JAMES BARRAT
Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
With the increasingly important role of intelligent machines in all phases of our lives--military, medical, economic and financial, political--it is odd to keep reading articles with titles such as Whatever Happened to Artificial Intelligence? This is a phenomenon that Turing had predicted: that machine intelligence would become so pervasive, so comfortable, and so well integrated into our information-based economy that people would fail even to notice it.
RAY KURZWEIL
The Age of Spiritual Machines
A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you at home. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to a life support and ceaselessly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers. If you don't provide the AI with a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it to deduce what behavior you prefer, you'll be stuck with whatever it comes up with. And since it's a highly complex system, you may never understand it well enough to make sure you've got it right.
JAMES BARRAT
Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
The human brain has about 100 billion neurons. With an estimated average of one thousand connections between each neuron and its neighbors, we have about 100 trillion connections, each capable of a simultaneous calculation ... (but) only 200 calculations per second.... With 100 trillion connections, each computing at 200 calculations per second, we get 20 million billion calculations per second. This is a conservatively high estimate.... In 1997, $2,000 of neural computer chips using only modest parallel processing could perform around 2 billion calculations per second.... This capacity will double every twelve months. Thus by the year 2020, it will have doubled about twenty-three times, resulting in a speed of about 20 million billion neural connection calculations per second, which is equal to the human brain.
RAY KURZWEIL
The Age of Spiritual Machines
An important concept both in Artificial Life and in Artificial Intelligence is that of a genetic algorithm (GA). GAs employ methods analogous to the processes of natural evolution in order to produce successive generations of software entities that are increasingly fit for their intended purpose.
JACK COPELAND
The Essential Turing
With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.
ELON MUSK
attributed, "Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence", Vanity Fair, Nov. 26, 2014
There's no denying that the field of artificial intelligence is booming. Our machines grow faster and smarter every year. Who can say what AIs will be capable of in five years, or ten? How close are we to creating a true race of machines, capable of everything we are, and much, much more? No one knows for sure. Maybe it's all just fantasy. Or ... maybe--just maybe--we're busy building our future conquerors.
MATTHEW JOHN DOEDEN
Can You Survive an Artificial Intelligence Uprising?
Intelligence is the art of good guesswork.
H. B. BARLOW
The Oxford Companion to the Mind
One can say that utopia is the final state of technological development. At this stage, technology becomes self-reflective.
BORIS GROYS
"Art, Technology, and Humanism", e-flux, May 2017
Artificial intelligence is about replacing human decision making with more sophisticated technologies.
FALGUNI DESAI
"The Age of Artificial Intelligence in Fintech", Forbes, June 30, 2016
A real artificial intelligence would be intelligent enough not to reveal that it was genuinely intelligent.
GEORGE DYSON
attributed, "Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence", Vanity Fair, Nov. 26, 2014
What if you stopped learning after graduation? It sounds stultifying, but that is how most machine-learning systems are trained. They master a task once and then are deployed. But some computer scientists are now developing artificial intelligence that learns and adapts continuously, much like the human brain.
MATTHEW HUTSON
"Artificial Intelligence Is Learning to Keep Learning", Scientific American, November 2018
When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto