Pages: about 22

110 quotes so far

2 Bill Clinton quotes on nanotechnology

2 Stephen Hawking quotes on AI

4 Newt Gingrich quotes on nanotechnology

1 Larry page quote on AI

3 Sergey Brin quotes on AI

5 Bill Joy quotes on AI/nanotechnology

1 Martin Rees quote

16 quotes from Edge.org 2009 question, “What Will Change Everything?”

3 William Hurlbut quotes on transhumanism/life extension

2 Leon Kass quotes on life extension

16 quotes from the NSF workshop on societal implications of nanotechnology

2 Ray Kurzweil quotes

3 Vernor Vinge quotes

3 Nick Bostrom quotes

1 Richard Dawkins quote

“My budget supports a major new national nanotechnology initiative worth $500 million. Cal Tech is no stranger to the idea of nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular level. Over 40 years ago, Cal Tech's own Richard Feynman asked, what would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them? ...Just imagine, materials with 10 times the strength of steel and only a fraction of the weight; shrinking all the information at the Library of Congress into a device the size of a sugar cube; detecting cancerous tumors that are only a few cells in size. Some of our research goals may take 20 or more years to achieve, but that is precisely why there is an important role for the federal government.”

– President Clinton in a speech at Caltech on January 21^st, 2000, announcing the National Nanotechnology Initiative

“Now, in the new century, innovations in science and technology will be key not only to the health of the environment but to miraculous improvements in the quality of our lives and advances in the economy's. ...We ought to keep in mind: government-funded research brought supercomputers, the Internet, and communications satellites into being. Soon researchers will bring us devices that can translate foreign languages as fast as you can talk; materials 10 times stronger than steel at a fraction of the weight; and, this is unbelievable to me, molecular computers the size of a teardrop with the power of today's fastest supercomputers.”

– President Clinton's 2000 State of the Union Address, January 27^th, 2000

“Now there seem to me to be three different ways in which the word has been used. Nanotechnology has sometimes been used to describe very small etching operations, of the kind you see in the smallest computer chips. And that's not really what you're talking about. ...Secondly, there has been an interesting discussion of what might be called micromachines. And sometimes the word nanotechnology has been used to describe the whole effort. ...And that's not really what you're talking about, either, though again there's some overlap at the boundary. What you're talking about when you use the phrase molecular nanotechnology is really a brand-new approach to fabrication, to manufacturing. The way we make things now, we take some substance in bulk and then whittle down the bulk to the size of the component we need, and then put different components together, and make something. What you're describing with the phrase molecular nanotechnology is a completely different approach which rests on the principle that your first building block is the molecule itself. And you're saying that we have all of the basic research breakthroughs that we need to build things one molecule at a time – all we need is the applications of the research necessary to really do it. And you're saying that the advantages of taking a molecular approach are really quite startling.”

– Senator Al Gore, June 26, 1992, responding to Dr. Eric Drexler at the “Testimony of Dr. K. Eric Drexler on Molecular Nanotechnology before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space”

“If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so machines can learn, that is worth 10 Microsofts.”

– Bill Gates

“I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence. All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion. We can someday replicate that on a machine.”

– Bill Gates, Time magazine, 1997

“Some people say that computers can never show true intelligence, whatever that may be. But it seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way. And if they are intelligent, they can presumably design computers that have even greater complexity and intelligence.”

– Stephen Hawking

 "In contrast with our intellect, computers double their performance every 18 months. So the danger is real that they could develop intelligence and take over the world."

– Stephen Hawking

“We're making steady progress toward Ray Kurzweil's singularity. And, you know, humans and machines are indeed starting to cross the chasm and move closer together, to ultimately reach that point where machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence.”

– Justin Rattner, CTO of Intel, Keynote at Intel Developers Summit 2008

“Once a computer learns by experience as well as by its original programming, and once it has access to much more information than any number of human geniuses might possess, the first thing that happens is that you don't really understand it anymore, and you don't know what it's doing or thinking about. You could be tempted to ask yourself in what way is machine intelligence any less sacrosanct than biological intelligence, and it might be difficult to arrive at an answer flattering to biological intelligence.”

– Stanley Kubrick

“The topic of this conference is the societal implications of nanoscience. Discoveries involving nanoscience will be as dramatic and, I believe, even more important than the creation of the Internet. Let’s consider the economic impact nanoscience may have our society. Bill Joy, co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, has estimated that the combination of the information and physical world will create in this century a thousand trillion dollars worth of wealth. As a former lawmaker, I thought I was used to dealing in big sums. This is really big! In fact, it would be adding 100 U.S. economies to the world market.”

– Newt Gingrich, at an NSF conference on the Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, March 2001, talk titled “The Age of Transitions”

“Taking the information nanoscience is teaching us about atoms and their activity and applying it has dramatic implications. Take the environment for example. We can learn to grow products using less energy and with less waste by product. It may mean that if we use dramatically less energy, then the projections and assumptions of current environmental debates, like Kyoto, are totally obsolete. It certainly means in biology that as we get better nano instrumentation and research tools, and if our nanoscale observational capabilities continue to grow, our capacity to deal with the complexities of human biology are going to go up dramatically and may not even be only orders of magnitude, but a different world of capabilities. For example, I recently met with the NSF cognitive science group and learned that in brain wave scanning, we are still at the molecular level. The potential of nano-level brain wave scanning is a new frontier in mind science.”

– Newt Gingrich, at an NSF conference on the Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, March 2001, talk titled “The Age of Transitions”

“I believe that we are actually at the edge of an age of discovery that is vastly richer than anybody yet understands. When I was at MIT they were very excited by the fact that the human ear has a million moving parts. We couldn’t have discovered that fifteen or twenty years ago. We still don’t fully understand what it means.”

– Newt Gingrich, at an NSF conference on the Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, March 2001, talk titled “The Age of Transitions”

“We are living through two patterns of change. The first is the enormous computer and communications revolution. We are at most only 1/5 of the way through it. The second, only now beginning to rise, is the combination of nanotechnology, biology, and information.

Nanotechnology allows us to “grow” materials by literally adding the right atoms and molecules to one another--a material technology breakthrough that changes the way we build things and how much they weigh. One example is that nanotechnology makes possible molecular “helpers” which could hunt cancer cells or clean clogged arteries.

The information revolution (computers and communications) impacts this technology in exponential ways, giving us better capabilities to deal with the nanoworld and with biology. It is the synergistic effect of these three systems together--nanotechnology multiplied by biology multiplied by information--that will lead to an explosion of new knowledge and new capabilities.”

– Newt Gingrich, Saving Lives and Saving Money, p. 173-177 September 22, 2003

“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So we have the ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. That’s obviously artificial intelligence, to be able to answer any question, basically, because almost everything is on the Web, right? We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on. And that’s tremendously interesting from an intellectual standpoint.”

– Larry Page, Google co-Founder, October 28, 2000

“The solution isn’t to limit the information you receive. Ultimately you want to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind. […] Your mind is tremendously efficient at weighing an enormous amount of information. We want to make smarter search engines that do a lot of the work for us. The smarter we can make the search engine, the better. Where will it lead? Who knows? But it’s credible to imagine a leap as great as that from hunting through library stacks to a Google session, when we leap from today’s search engines to having the entirety of the world’s information as just one of our thoughts.”

– Sergey Brin, Google co-Founder, interview with Playboy, October 2004

“I think we’re pretty far along compared to 10 years ago. At the same time, where can you go? Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off. Between that and today, there’s plenty of space to cover.”

– Sergey Brin, interview with Newsweek, 2004

“In the future, search engines should be as useful as HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey — but hopefully they won't kill people.”
– Sergey Brin

“Every time I talk about Google’s future with Larry Page, he argues that it will become an artificial intelligence.”

– Steve Jurvetson, Managing Partner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

“One of my favorite things is artificial intelligence but it has gotten a very bad rap…but my prediction is that when AI happens it’s going to be a lot of computation and not so much clever algorithms but just a lot of computation. My theory is that if you look at your programming, your DNA, it’s about 600 megabytes compressed, so it’s smaller than any modern operating system, smaller than Linux or Windows or anything like that, your whole operating system, that includes booting up your brain, by definition. So your program algorithms probably aren’t that complicated, it’s probably more about the overall computation, but that’s my guess.

We have some people at Google who are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale and so on, and in fact, to make search better, to do the perfect job of search you could ask any query and it would give you the perfect answer and that would be artificial intelligence based on everything being on the web, which is a pretty close approximation. We’re lucky enough to be working incrementally closer to that, but again, very, very few people are working on this, and I don’t think it’s as far off as people think.”

– Larry Page, address at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Francisco, February 24, 2007

“Borg-like disasters are a staple of science fiction, so why hadn't I been more concerned about such robotic dystopias earlier? Why weren't other people more concerned about these nightmarish scenarios? Part of the answer certainly lies in our attitude toward the new - in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology - pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once - but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.”

– Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, “Why the future doesn't need us”, WIRED magazine, April 2000

“The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) - are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them. Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication. I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.”

– Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, “Why the future doesn't need us”, WIRED magazine, April 2000

“But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities.

Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?”

– Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, “Why the future doesn't need us”, WIRED magazine, April 2000

“How soon could such an intelligent robot be built? The coming advances in computing power seem to make it possible by 2030. And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.”

– Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, “Why the future doesn't need us”, WIRED magazine, April 2000

“...[L]ast summer, Brosl Hasslacher told me that nanoscale molecular electronics was now practical. This was new news, at least to me, and I think to many people - and it radically changed my opinion about nanotechnology. It sent me back to Engines of Creation. Rereading Drexler's work after more than 10 years, I was dismayed to realize how little I had remembered of its lengthy section called "Dangers and Hopes," including a discussion of how nanotechnologies can become "engines of destruction." Indeed, in my rereading of this cautionary material today, I am struck by how naive some of Drexler's safeguard proposals seem, and how much greater I judge the dangers to be now than even he seemed to then.”

– Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, “Why the future doesn't need us”, WIRED magazine, April 2000

“I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

– Freeman Dyson, theoretical physicist, speaking in the documentary The Day After Trinity: Robert J. Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb

“It would be incredibly foolish to create "conscious" machines. […] [T]his is the kind of speculation that the transhumanists want us to pursue. Because if machines can have "human" rights, it means that there is nothing particularly exceptional about being human. It means we will have to earn our rights, along with machines, by possessing requisite capacities. And that means the end of universal human rights. We are out of our minds to follow this course. And it is a very dangerous game. Remember what I have been saying lately: The most dangerous sentence in the history of the world may be, "It can't happen here.”

– Wesley J. Smith, bioethicist, Discovery Institute

“It is not my aim to surprise or shock you – but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future – the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.”

– Herbert Simon, polymath, recipient of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics

“There are no morals about technology at all. Technology expands our ways of thinking about things, expands our ways of doing things. If we're bad people we use technology for bad purposes and if we're good people we use it for good purposes.”

– Herbert Simon, polymath, recipient of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics

“Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”
– Oscar Wilde in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"

“It is hard to imagine anything that would "change everything" as much as a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence—the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. A very small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost its effectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity. The ensuing change would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than even the transforming power of electrification.”

– Kevin Kelly, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“For the first time, it should be possible to delineate the nature of talent. This breakthrough will come about through a combination of findings from genetics (do highly talented individuals have a distinctive, recognizable genetic profile?); neuroscience (are there structural or functional neural signatures, and, importantly, can these be recognized early in life?); cognitive psychology (are the mental representations of talented individuals distinctive when contrasted to those of hard workers); and the psychology of motivation (why are talented individuals often characterized as having 'a rage to learn, a passion to master?)”

– Howard Gardner, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“But what if [molecular] nanotechnology in the radical and grandiose sense actually became possible? What if, indeed, it became an operational reality? That would be a fundamentally transformative development, changing forever how manufacturing is done and how the world works. Imagine all of our material needs being produced at trivial cost, without human labor, and with no waste. No more sweat shops, no more smoke-belching factories, no more grinding workdays or long commutes. The magical molecular assemblers will do it all, permanently eliminating poverty in the process.”

– Ed Regis, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“Now let your imagination run wild. What would a chimpanzee do with the generative machinery that a human has when it is running computations in language, mathematics and music? Could it imagine the previously unimaginable? What if we gave a genius like Einstein the key components that made Bach a different kind of genius? Could Einstein now imagine different dimensions of musicality? These very same neural manipulations are now even possible at the genetic level. Genetic engineering allows us to insert genes from one species into another, or manipulate the expressive range of a gene, jazzing it up or turning it off.”

– Marc D. Hauser, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“I can think of two ways in which mortality can be tamed. One at the cellular level and the other through an integration of body with genetic, cognitive sciences, and cyber technology. I'm sure there are others.”

– Marcelo Gleiser, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“Whether abrupt and singular, or more gradual and multi-polar, the transition from human-level to superintelligence would of pivotal significance. Superintelligence would be the last invention biological man would ever need to make, since, by definition, it would be much better at inventing than we are. All sorts of theoretically possible technologies could be developed quickly by superintelligence — advanced molecular manufacturing, medical nanotechnology, human enhancement technologies, uploading, weapons of all kinds, lifelike virtual realities, self-replicating space-colonizing robotic probes, and more. It would also be super-effective at creating plans and strategies, working out philosophical problems, persuading and manipulating, and much else beside.”

– Nick Bostrom, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“...it should be possible to use alternative, technological means to produce conscious thought. Efforts are already underway to replace damaged brain parts such as the hippocampus with hypercomputer implants. If and when the initial medical imperative is met, elective implants will undoubtedly be used to upgrade normal brain operations. As the fast evolving devices improve they will begin to outperform the original brain, it will make less and less sense to continue to do one's thinking in the old biological clunker, and formerly human minds will become entirely artificial as they move into ultra sophisticated, dispersed robot systems. Assuming that the above developments are practical, technological progress will not merely improve the human condition, it should replace it. The conceit that humans in anything like their present form will be able to compete in a world of immortal superminds with unlimited intellectual capacity is naïve; there simply will not be much for people to do. Do not for a minute imagine a society of crude Terminators, or Datas that crave to be as human as possible. Future robots will be devices of subtle sophistication and sensitivity that will expose humans as the big brained apes we truly are. The logic predicts that most humans will choose to become robotic.”

– Gregory Paul, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“These physical tools would make possible the practice of "Radiotelepathy", the direct communication of feelings and thoughts from brain to brain. The ancient myth of telepathy, induced by occult and spooky action-at-a-distance, would be replaced by a prosaic kind of telepathy induced by physical tools. To make radiotelepathy possible, we have only to invent two new technologies, first the direct conversion of neural signals into radio signals and vice versa, and second the placement of microscopic radio transmitters and receivers within the tissue of a living brain. I do not have any idea of the way these inventions will be achieved, but I expect them to emerge from the rapid progress of neurology before the twenty-first century is over.”

– Freeman Dyson, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“If these developments are not life changing enough, they will, in the longer-term usher in a new era in which our minds, the thing that we think of as "us", can become separated from our body, or nearly separated anyway. I don't suggest we will be able to transplant our mind to another body, but we will be able to introduce new body parts into existing bodies with a resident mind. With enough such replacements, we will become potentially immortal: like ancient buildings that exist only because over the centuries each of their many stones has been replaced. An intriguing aspect of re-programming cells is that they can be induced to 'forget' how old they are. Aging will become a thing of the past if you can afford enough new pieces. We will then discover the extent to which our minds arise from perceptions of our bodies and the passage of time. If you give an old person the body of a teenager do they start to behave and think like one? Who knows, but it will be game-changing to find out.”

– Mark Pagel, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“Quite soon, simple pills containing designer supplements will target our most common disorders — cardiovascular, diabetes, neurological. Beyond that, the era of affordable, personal genomics makes possible designer supplements, now called neutrigenomics. Tailored to each personal genome, these can enforce the repair mechanisms and augmentations that nature herself provided to the genomically fortunate.”

– Gregory Benford, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“Humanity will see, before I die, the "Singularity," the day when we finally create a human level artificial intelligence. This involves considering the physics advances that will be required to create the computer that is capable of running a strong AI program.”

– Frank J. Tipler, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“These technological developments will not only improve clinical treatment, but will also advance scientific theory. Along with applications designed to cure will come demands for applications that aim to enhance. What if we could precisely but noninvasively modulate mood, alertness, memory, control, willpower, and more? Of course, everyone wants to win the brain game. But are we ready for the rules to change?”

– Brian Knutson, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“Certainly, deep brain stimulation is not currently used to render sane people more thoughtful, agreeable, gentle or considerate. Potential adverse neurosurgical side effects aside, ethical considerations prohibit using deep brain stimulation to enhance a brain considered to be normal. But history teaches two lessons: Any technology will tend to become more precise, effective and safer over time, and, anything that can be done, ultimately will be done, philosophical and ethical considerations notwithstanding.”

– Marcel Kinsbourne, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“Artificial companions will make for more intimate conversations, not just because of their proximity, but because they will speak our language from the first moment of their stirring sentience. However, I fear what might happen as they evolve exponentially. Will they become so smart that they no longer want to talk to us? Will they develop an agenda of their own that makes utterly no sense from a human perspective? A world shared with super-intelligent robots is a hard thing to imagine. If we are lucky, our new mind children will treat us as pets. If we are very unlucky, they will treat us as food.”

– Paul Saffo, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“It may not happen within my lifetime, but the biggest game change will be the ultimate synthesis of computation and biology. Biotech will eventually allow our brains to be scanned at a level sufficient to preserve our memories and reproduce our consciousness when uploaded to a more efficient computational substrate. At this point our mind may be copied, and, if desired, embedded and connected to the somatic helms of designed biological forms. We will become branching selves, following many different paths at once for the adventure, the fun, and the love of it. Life in the real world presents extremely rich experiences, and uploaded intelligences in virtual worlds will come outside where they can fly as a falcon, sprint as a cheetah, love, play, or even just breath — with superhuman consciousness, no lag, and infinite bandwidth. People will dance with nature, in all its possible forms. And we'll kitesurf.”

– A. Garrett Lisi, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“While medicine will advance in the next half century, we are not on a crash-course for achieving immortality by curing all disease. Bodies simply wear down with use. We are on a crash-course, however, with technologies that let us store unthinkable amounts of data and run gargantuan simulations. Therefore, well before we understand how brains work, we will find ourselves able to digitally copy the brain's structure and able to download the conscious mind into a computer.”

– David Eagleman, in his answer to the 2009 Edge.org question, “What Will Change Everything?”

“AI and computer science have already set about trying to fill [...] niches, and that is a worthy, if never-ending, pursuit. But the biggest prize, I think, is for the creation of an artificial intelligence as flexible as the biological ones. That will win it. Ignore the naysayers; go for it!”

-- Nils J. Nilsson, AI pioneer, professor of computer science at Stanford University, “The Eye on the Prize”, in AI Magazine, 1995

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. [...] It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.”

– Irving John Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”,
in Advances in Computers, by Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, 1965

“In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.”

– George Dyson, science historian, author of Darwin Among the Machines

“In the next 10 years, we’ll see more progress, more change than the world has seen in the last 10 centuries.”

– Mitt Romney

“During a question-and-answer session after a presentation at his alma matter, Stanford University, in May 2002, Page said that Google would fulfill its mission only when its search engine was “AI-complete”. “You guys know what that means? That’s artificial intelligence”.

– Nicholas Carr, technology commentator, in The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google (2008)

“The impact of nanotechnology on health, wealth and the standard of living for people will be at least the combined influences of microelectronics, medical imaging, computer-aided engineering and man-made polymers in the 20th century”

– Richard Smalley, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and co-discoverer of buckyballs

“Only a small community has concentrated on general intelligence. No one has tried to make a thinking machine and then teach it chess — or the very sophisticated oriental board game Go. [...] The bottom line is that we really haven't progressed too far toward a truly intelligent machine. We have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack. [...] We have got to get back to the deepest questions of AI and general intelligence and quit wasting time on little projects that don't contribute to the main goal.”

– Marvin Minsky, Toshiba Professor, Media Arts and Sciences, MIT

“I certainly think that humans are not the limit of evolutionary complexity. There may indeed be post–human entities, either organic or silicon–based, which can in some respects surpass what a human can do. I think it would be rather surprising if our mental capacities were matched to understanding all the key levels of reality. The chimpanzees certainly aren't, so why should ours be either? So there may be levels that will have to await some post-human emergence.”

– Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society

“There's this stupid myth out there that AI has failed, but AI is everywhere around you every second of the day. People just don't notice it. You've got AI systems in cars, tuning the parameters of the fuel injection systems. When you land in an airplane, your gate gets chosen by an AI scheduling system. Every time you use a piece of Microsoft software, you've got an AI system trying to figure out what you're doing, like writing a letter, and it does a pretty damned good job. Every time you see a movie with computer–generated characters, they're all little AI characters behaving as a group. Every time you play a video game, you're playing against an AI system.”

– Dr. Rodney Brooks, Director, MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory

"I believe that machines will eventually become more intelligent than humans. It seems to be a logical conclusion by just looking at the tremendous research efforts being deployed worldwide in all areas of AI and robotics. The time horizon may be 50 to 100 years. I would downplay the exponential increase in processing power as a major factor bringing us closer to an intelligent machine. CPUs are just dumb devices; it is the artificial intelligence algorithms, self-learning and cognitive capabilities that will create an intelligent entity."

– Benoit Boulet, robotics researcher and director of the McGill Centre for Intelligent Machines

“I actually find a preoccupation with anti-aging technologies to be, I think, somewhat spiritually immature and unmanly.”

– William B. Hurlbut, former member of the President's Council on Bioethics and a consulting professor in the Program in Human Biology at Stanford University

“Genes are not Legos; you can't just plug them in and get a better baby. Genetics is very complicated; most genes affect many traits and most traits are affected by many genes. It's not like Mr. Potato Head–you can't just stick on new ears or a better nose or a bigger brain. These schemes amount to a massive human experiment, an imposition of our imagination and ideology onto the next generation–without consulting them and without a deeply considered appreciation for the fragile balance of our natural being–or our natural body. We are the product of nearly 4 billion years of evolutionary refinement. Our minds and the sense of meaning in our lives are wrapped into our very embodied form–our natural body is the fragile frame of our freedom and comprehending consciousness. If we're not careful, we could write ourselves right out of our own story.”

– William B. Hurlbut

“The idea of designing people for specific aptitudes or superior performance capacities goes against the very strength of our species. We are a "general purpose organism"; we have adapted for adaptability, not for a narrow specialization. Our very strength is in creative flexibility, freedom, and open indeterminacy. These are what give us our extraordinary capabilities, our comprehending consciousness, and controlling powers. Our species may already be the optimal design for fullest overall functioning and flourishing of life. Indeed, it is our very strength that is now threatening us. Liberated from the immediacies of mere survival, we are open to imagination, to the ambition of technological self-transformation that could shatter the fragile balance of our physical and psychological functioning.”

– William B. Hurlbut

“Here, I think, I am in a kind of uncomfortable position of saying, look, this is research of enormous promise and considerable danger, not in the way in which bacteriological weaponry is dangerous, but this is dangerous the way Midas' wish is dangerous. It gets you exactly what you want, and you might discover only too late that what you wanted was not exactly what you really needed or desired. What you wished for is not really what you wanted.”

– Leon Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics

“The finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual, whether he knows it or not.”

– Leon Kass

“There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death.”

– Daniel Callahan, bioethicist at the Hastings Centre

“It's not just better medical care, it's advances [in research] that will allow us to really slow down aging... People have wanted it forever, and now here it is. Now that we have all these research tools, we can work on it seriously.”

– Steve Austad Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Cellular and Structural Biology, Perdue University

“I personally am very enthusiastic about the prospect that, at some time in the future, we may be able to intervene in some way in the aging process of humans.”

– S. Jay Olshansky Ph.D., Professor at the School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago

“...it’s possible that we could change a human gene and double our life span.”

– Cynthia Kenyon Ph.D., molecular biologist at UCSF, in an interview by Steven Kotler in Discover, vol. 25, no. 11, 2004

“We know now that ageing is neither inevitable nor necessary.”

-- Dr. Tom Kirkwood

“I am convinced that longevity will increase faster than people expect in this century. The science is ripe, good people are getting into the field, and as we understand mechanisms there will be many ways to intervene.”

– Bruce Ames Ph.D., American molecular geneticist, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center, University of California, Berkeley

“Over the next 10 to 20 years we will likely find many ways to intervene in the human biological processes of aging that will prolong the health-span.”

– Caleb Finch Ph.D, Director, Gerontology Research Institute, professor at the USC David School of Biogerontology

“I am absolutely convinced we are going to be able to extend human life, this is not science fiction.”

– Tom Johnson Ph.D., Professor of Behavioral Genetics, University of Colorado at Boulder

"I think that given sufficient funding we have a 50-50 chance of completely stopping people from dying of old age within about 25 or 30 years from now."

– Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from an interview in the BBC 4 documentary, "Do You Want to Live Forever?"

“Few people not directly involved in gerontological research are fully aware of the exciting developments in the study of aging and what I feel is the very real prospect of devising effective means of postponing age-related disease and functional decline and yes, prolonging life.”

– Andrzej Bartke, Director of the Aging & Longevity Research Laboratory at the University of Southern Illinois

“It's not a question of if, but when, and where and how [aging interventions] will arrive.”

– Gregory Stock Ph.D.,Director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA’s School of Public Health

“I am working on immortality. Twenty years ago the idea of postponing aging, let alone reversing it, was weird and off-the-wall. Today there are good reasons for thinking it is fundamentally possible.”

– Michael Rose, Ph.D, professor of evolutionary biology at UC Irvine

“Mankind will postpone human aging substantially in the future, doubling the human lifespan at least, when we have accomplished this we will be ashamed that we did not work on it much sooner.”

– Michael Rose

"The neuroscience community has advanced our collective knowledge of brain function to the point where it is now possible to build accurate and meaningful computational models of major brain pathways. I have focused on the auditory pathway, aided by direct collaboration with the world's leading auditory neuroscientists. It is now possible to visualize the responses of large ensembles of neurons to complex real-world sounds such as speech, music, and sounds moving through space, for the first time giving us the opportunity to see the computations we are effortlessly performing at a subconscious level. With care, it is possible to verify that our models agree with biological function -- once the principles of operation are known, it is in fact possible to build engineered systems that outperform the human system in quantifiable ways. [...] The next two decades promise an exciting period of advances in our understanding of the nature of human intelligence, and the development of increasingly intelligent assistants and prosthetics that enrich human life in ways we can now only imagine."

- Lloyd Watts, computational neuroscientist, 2002 World Congress on Computational Intelligence, Plenary Session

“New information technology (possibly nanotech enabled) combined with better understanding of human and machine cognition, may give us new decision support systems. Information display and data fusion are already important military technologies. If memory aids (information storage and analysis) can be integrated with the human brain for decision support, applications in areas beyond military and emergency situations may become available. Related technologies would be interface devices such as wireless communication to the ear or displays on the retina, or reasoning support systems that would serve as decision advisors.”

– G. Yonas and S.T. Picraux, invited experts from Sandia National Laboratories, in a presentation “National Needs Drivers for Nanotechnology” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“A single technological innovation can remake the world. […] A single class of technology — nuclear weapons — was a central determinant of geopolitical evolution after the end of World War II.”

– M.M. Crow and D. Sarewitz, invited experts from Columbia University, in a presentation “Nanotechnology and Societal Transformation” at the NSF- sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“The transition from the eye to the light microscope expanded our field of vision by about 1000-fold. Modern electronics circuits have components that are visible with the eye and the light microscope. We have another 1000-fold of magnification open to us from the light microscope to the TEM and the AFM. We can only imagine the potential that this 1000-fold factor will have in the evolution of electronic devices and in the creation of new technology — nanotechnology — in all industries.”

– J.M. Garcés and M.C. Cornell, invited experts from Dow Chemical, in a presentation “Nanotechnology and Societal Transformation” at the NSF- sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“To grasp some implications of a mature nanotechnology, imagine a world where information technology is truly ubiquitous and dirt cheap, where even trivial human artifacts contain extraordinary complexity and therefore extraordinary ability to process and communicate information. These broad capabilities of future information technology are easy to forecast, but their implications for society are still difficult to discern. History suggests that the most important future applications of the technology will surprise us.”

– Thomas N. Theis, invited expert from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, in a presentation “Information Technology Based on a Mature Nanotechnology: Some Societal Implications” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“This brings me to the last defining characteristic of a mature nanotechnology — very inexpensive manufacturing processes. The cost of microelectronics is currently dominated by the cost of the lithographic and related process tools used in manufacturing. Tooling costs increase dramatically every time the minimum lithographic dimension is shrunk. Processes of natural assembly can supplement and may someday eliminate lithography in much of our manufacturing. To be sure, the manufacture of complex, technologically useful structures will still require precise control of process conditions. However, we envision a class of manufacturing tools and processes which are simpler, more conservative of resources, and thus more cost-efficient than those of current practice. As we learn to build structures that are information-rich down to the atomic scale, the cost of information technology should continue to drop by many orders of magnitude.”

– Thomas N. Theis, invited expert from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, in a presentation “Information Technology Based on a Mature Nanotechnology: Some Societal Implications” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“The human body is already wired by nature. Our nervous system operates on electrical impulses, generated by synaptic connections. There are many instances in which the electrical signals between the brain and an organ or a part of the body are disturbed or blocked. This could be due to an accident, disease, or defect; nanoscience and technology will play an increasingly important role here. Let me take an example to be concrete. Let us suppose there is a spinal injury, and signals to and from the brain can no longer be transmitted below the injured site. A chip can intercept the neuronal electrical signals, transmit them across the injured site, and then another chip couples the signal back to the body’s nervous system. There can be many variants of this idea. There is already research in this area, but more is encouraged, for the benefits to mankind are obvious.”

– P. Chaudhari, invited expert from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, in a presentation “Future Implications of Nano-scale Science and Technology: Wired Humans, Quantum Legos, and an Ocean of Information” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“What will the appliances built in the next 20 years be able to do that they cannot do today? For one, they will be able to converse with people. By the year 2020, the data handling capacity of a “low end” electronic system will be roughly equivalent to that of the human brain. At that point in time, it should be possible for our electronic devices to pass a limited version of the “Turing Test” — in other words, to take part in a five-minute conversation with an individual so convincing that the person could not determine whether he was talking to another human being or a machine. This capability to converse in natural language should finally make the human machine interface as natural as our interactions with other people. It will mean a significant shift in our view of the dividing line between what is natural and what is manmade, as well as produce entirely new goods and services that will seem essential then, but which we cannot even imagine today.”

– R.S. Williams and P.J. Kuekes, invited experts from Hewlett-Packard Labs, in a presentation “We've Only Just Begun” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“If nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter at the atomic level, at maturity achieves even a fraction of its promise, it will force the reassessment of global markets and economies and industries on a scale never experienced before in human history.”

– J. Canton, invited expert from Institute for Global Futures, in a presentation “The Strategic Impact of Nanotechnology on the Future of Business and Economics” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“Why is the potential economic impact of nanotechnology so important to consider? Nanotechnology is a fundamental design science, yet to emerge, mostly theoretical today, that may well provide us with the tools to engineer inorganic and organic matter at the atomic level. Nanotechnology, if even partially realized, over the next few decades has the potential to realign society, change business and affect economics at the structural level. New business models, design tools and manufacturing strategies may emerge at price points much reduced and highly efficient.”

– J. Canton, invited expert from Institute for Global Futures, in a presentation “The Strategic Impact of Nanotechnology on the Future of Business and Economics” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“If developments in nanotechnology reach a critical mass in supplying radically innovative breakthroughs in automated self-assembly, as one example, most vertical industries will be influenced. Most industrial and post-industrial supply chains will be changed. What if the fabrication lines for making computers are reduced in costs by 50%? What if drug development and manufacturing costs are reduced by 70%? What if energy sources were not dependent upon fossil fuels? What then might the impact be if nanotechnology were applied to real cost reductions for essential goods and services that affect quality of life, health, habitat and transportation? There would be a dramatic impact on lifestyles, jobs, and economics. Most value chains, supportive linkages, alliances and channels of distribution will be altered. Institutions of learning, financial services and certainly manufacturing will be reshaped.”

– J. Canton, invited expert from Institute for Global Futures, in a presentation “The Strategic Impact of Nanotechnology on the Future of Business and Economics” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“[Nanotechnology] promises to reduce by orders of magnitudes the inputs of energy and materials and associated environmental discharges required to produce a device that can perform a particular task. The result could be perhaps an order of magnitude increase in real income for the current world population without requiring more energy, materials, or resulting in additional discharges. Thus, nanotechnology offers the prospect of giving poor nations much higher standards of living and making the world economy sustainable.”

– L.B. Lave, invited expert from Carnegie Mellon University, in a presentation “Lifecycle/Sustainability Implications of Nanotechnology” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“Our vision of nanotechnology encompasses the attributes of self-generation, reproduction, self-assembly, self-repair and natural adaptation. These are all attributes we ascribe to living things. Thus, we are moving beyond the typical bounds of technology into the domain of natural philosophy. This can have significant implications for the public attitude toward such technology. Nanotechnology will enable NASA to build future systems with many of these “life-like” characteristics.”

– S.L. Venneri, invited expert from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in a presentation “Implications of Nanotechnology for Space Exploration” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“Nanotechnology will enable us to take the notion of “small but powerful” to its extreme limits. Biology will provide many of the paradigms and processes for doing so. Biology has inherent characteristics to enable us to build the systems we need: selectivity and sensitivity at a scale of a few atoms; the ability of single units to massively reproduce with near zero error rates; organization capability to self assemble into highly complex systems; the ability to adapt form and function to changing conditions; the ability to detect damage and self repair; and the ability to communicate among themselves. Biologically inspired sensors will be sensitive to a single photon. Data storage based on DNA will be a trillion times more dense than current media; and supercomputers computers modeled after the brain will use as little as a billionth the power of existing designs. Biological concepts and nanotechnology will enable us to create both the “brains and the body” of future systems with the characteristics we need. Together, nanotechnology, biology and information technology form a powerful and intimate scientific and technological triad.”

– S.L. Venneri, invited expert from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in a presentation “Implications of Nanotechnology for Space Exploration” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“[A]s we merge nanotechnology with biology and information technology we will be building systems that become more and more “lifelike” and which interact with and support living systems at the cellular level. On the positive side this will result in systems that more effectively meet our needs and communicate with us on our own level — for example, natural language. Sensory systems such as sight, sound and touch will mimic our own, though exceed human performance levels. This is what we envision for space systems.”

– S.L. Venneri, invited expert from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in a presentation “Implications of Nanotechnology for Space Exploration” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“Long Term (over 20 years)

· Nanosystems may help solve problems of disease and aging, pollution and scarcity,

overpopulation and starvation, and could create revolutionary changes unlike any

ever seen.

· Nanosystems could help produce alternatives to fossil fuels and their high

environmental price and reliance on foreign sources.

· The transition from a pre-nano to a post-nano world could be very traumatic and

could exacerbate the problem of haves vs. have-nots. Have-nots do not easily obtain

access to new technologies; the difference between the lives of the nano-rich and the

nano-poor will likely be striking.

· Potential harmful uses — intentional and unintentional — need to be studied well in

advance: nano weapons; intelligence-gathering devices; nanotechnology combined

with Artificial Intelligence to form super-intelligent but virtually invisible devices;

artificial viruses to which humans have no immunity, etc.”

– Richard H. Smith, invited expert from Coates & Jarratt, Inc., in a presentation “The Social, Ethical, and Legal Implications of Nanotechnology” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“Optimists from organizations like the Foresight Institute can provide insights into the kinds of systems that seem to be within the realm of the possible if assemblers can be made to work.”

– Richard H. Smith, invited expert from Coates & Jarratt, Inc., in a presentation “The Social, Ethical, and Legal Implications of Nanotechnology” at the NSF-sponsored Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology workshop, Sept. 29, 2000

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.”

– Woody Allen

"As the computational power to emulate the human brain becomes available - we're not there yet, but we will be there within a couple of decades - projects already under way to scan the human brain will be accelerated, with a view both to understand the human brain in general, as well as providing a detailed description of the contents and design of specific brains. By the third decade of the twenty-first century, we will be in a position to create highly detailed and complete maps of all relevant features of all neurons, neural connections and synapses in the human brain, all of the neural details that play a role in the behavior and functionality of the brain, and to recreate these designs in suitably advanced neural computers."

- Ray Kurzweil

“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... by the year 2020, (a massively parallel neural net computer) will have doubled about 23 times (from 1997's $2,000 modestly parallel computer that could perform around 2 billion connection calculations per second) ... 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, 1999

"Phase 4: Complete the brain. This involves scaling up the computing resource by the final order of magnitude. Timescale: 15-20 years. These "plans" could easily turn out to be very cautious; all that is required is a major breakthrough in understanding neural encoding and appropriate abstractions and the whole lot could fall into place in half the time I suggest here."

- Steve Furber, computational neuroscientist, Fellow of the Royal Society, 2000

"Dramatic increases in collective human-machine intelligence are possible within 25 years. It is also possible that within the next 25 years single individuals acting alone might use advances in science and technology (S&T) to create and use weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Most people do not appreciate how fast science and technology will change over the next 25 years. The synergies and confluence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science (NBIC) are a particularly important new merger of science and engineering supported by both government and venture capitalists. NBIC tools will dramatically increase individual and group performance and the support systems of civilization."

- 2003 State of the Future, Executive Summary, American Council for United Nations University

“One consideration that should be taken into account when deciding whether to promote the development of superintelligence is that if superintelligence is feasible, it will likely be developed sooner or later. Therefore, we will probably one day have to take the gamble of superintelligence no matter what. But once in existence, a superintelligence could help us reduce or eliminate other existential risks, such as the risk that advanced nanotechnology will be used by humans in warfare or terrorism, a serious threat to the long-term survival of intelligent life on earth. If we get to superintelligence first, we may avoid this risk from nanotechnology and many others. If, on the other hand, we get nanotechnology first, we will have to face both the risks from nanotechnology and, if these risks are survived, also the risks from superintelligence. The overall risk seems to be minimized by implementing superintelligence, with great care, as soon as possible.”

– Dr. Nick Bostrom, Director of Oxford Future of Humanity Institute

“To any thoughtful person, the singularity idea, even if it seems wild, raises a gigantic, swirling cloud of profound and vital questions about humanity and the powerful technologies it is producing. Given this mysterious and rapidly approaching cloud, there can be no doubt that the time has come for the scientific and technological community to seriously try to figure out what is on humanity's collective horizon. Not to do so would be hugely irresponsible.”

– Dr. Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

“Multiple R&D programs will likely lead to multiple successes, which could very well lead to competition at the national military level as well as an MNT arms race. Multiple programs will mean varying levels of success, and the leading organization or state will be less likely to agree to regulation, particularly if such regulation would decrease or eliminate its lead. Given MNT’s tremendous potential for both peaceful and violent applications, controlling it with a “do nothing” strategy is analogous to providing nuclear reactors to every country under the assumption that none will use them to develop nuclear weapons. This strategy is unlikely to work and is in fact highly dangerous.”

– Lieutenant Commander Thomas D. Vandermolen, US Navy, on molecular nanotechnology in the essay “Molecular Nanotechnology and National Security”

“It's haughty of us to think we're the end product of evolution. All of us are a part of producing whatever is coming next. We're at an exciting time. We're close to the singularity. Go back to that litany of chemistry leading to single–celled organisms, leading to intelligence. The first step took a billion years, the next step took a hundred million, and so on. We're at a stage where things change on the order of decades, and it seems to be speeding up. Technology has the autocatalytic effect of fast computers, which let us design better and faster computers faster. We're heading toward something which is going to happen very soon – in our lifetimes – and which is fundamentally different from anything that's happened in human history before.”

– Dr. W. Daniel Hillis, Chairman and CTO, Applied Minds

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

– Vernor Vinge, VISION-21 Symposium, NASA, 1993

“I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.”

– Vernor Vinge

We are living through a period of unprecedented technological and scientific advances and sometime soon the convergence of fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology will push humanity past a tipping point, ushering in a period of wrenching change.

– Vernor Vinge, in “Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?” by Gregory Mone, Popular Science, 2004

“AI researchers may be the victims of their own success. The public takes for granted that the Internet is searchable and that people can make airline reservations over the phone - these are examples of AI at work. [...] As soon as we solve a problem, instead of looking at the solution as AI, we come to view it as just another computer system.

– Martha Pollack, executive editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, interview by Mark Baard, Wired News 2003

All ideas originate in the brain: the operation producing them is the remote effect of an agitation or impression on the extremities of the nerves of sense; directly they are consequences of a change or operation in the proper organ of the sense which constitutes a part of the brain, and over these organs, once brought into action by external impulse, the mind has influence.

– Charles Bell, The Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain, 1811

“All thought is a kind of computation.”

– Thomas Hobbes, quoted in Dissertation on the Art of Combinations, by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1666

“Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? And will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?”

-- George Eliot, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879

“Amidst all the hyperbole about thinking machines that has accompanied the emergence of large-scale parallel computers from their serial predecessors, we have begun to contemplate the prospect of simulating some of our brain's massive parallelism. But one immediately runs into a role reversal worthy of a Mozart opera: the most distinctively human higher brain functions are surprisingly serial. Human beings are perpetually stringing things together: phonemes into words, words into sentences, concepts into scenarios - and then fussing about getting them in the right order. Our brain uses word-order rules to create a very productive language, with an infinite number of novel messages, rather than the several dozen standard interpretations Dissociated with the several dozen cries and grunts of any other primate species. It is not our mellifluous voices that constitute a significant advance but rather our arrangement rules, the meaningful order in which we chain our utterances.”

– William H. Calvin, “The Brain as a Darwin Machine”, in Nature, 1987

“The brain's functions simply aren't based on any small set of principles. Instead they're based on hundreds or perhaps thousands of them. In other words, I'm saying that each part of the brain is what engineers call a kludge-- that is, a jury-rigged solution to a problem, accomplished by adding bits of machinery wherever needed, without any general, overall plan: the result is that the human mind-- which is what the brain does-- should be regarded as a collection of kludges.”
– Marvin Minsky, from The Third Culture

“The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.”
– Stephen Jay Gould

“Knowledge can bring power, and power can bring knowledge. Depending on their natures and their goals, advanced AI systems might accumulate enough knowledge and power to displace us, if we don't prepare properly. And as with replicators, mere evolutionary "superiority" need not make the victors better than the vanquished by any standard but brute competitive ability. This threat makes one thing perfectly clear: we need to find ways to live with thinking machines...”

– K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation, 1986

“Replicating assemblers and thinking machines pose basic threats to people and to life on Earth. Today's organisms have abilities far from the limits of the possible, and our machines are evolving faster than we are. Within a few decades they seem likely to surpass us. Unless we learn to live with them in safety, our future will likely be both exciting and short. We cannot hope to foresee all the problems ahead, yet by paying attention to the big, basic issues, we can perhaps foresee the greatest challenges and get some idea of how to deal with them.

– K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation, 1986

“Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joy, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears.”

– Hippocrates of Cos (about 400 BC)

“My dream appliance circa 2050 has one big dial on it, and when I twist it to the right, my IQ goes up to 450.”

– Bruce Sterling

“Neither the fact that machine intelligence would be scary nor the fact that some past predictions were wrong is a good ground for concluding that artificial intelligence will never be created. Indeed, to assume that artificial intelligence is impossible or will take thousands of years to develop seems at least as unwarranted as to make the opposite assumption. At a minimum, we must acknowledge that any scenario about what the world will be like in 2050 which simply postulates the absence human-level artificial intelligence is making a big assumption that could well turn out to be false.”

– Nick Bostrom, When Machines Outsmart Humans, Futures, 2000

“Personally I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.”

– Richard Dawkins

“The synergy between AI and Brain Sciences will yield profound advances in our understanding of intelligence over the coming decade, fundamentally changing the nature of our field.”

– Tom M. Mitchell, “AI and the Impending Revolution in Brain Sciences”, AAAI presidential address, 2002