Quotes from Oren Etzioni

One of my favorite sayings is, 'Much have I learned from my teachers, but even more from my friends and even more from my students.'

A lot of people are scared that machines will take over the world, machines will turn evil: the Hollywood 'Terminator' scenario.

Science is going to be revolutionized by AI assistants.

It's paradoxical that things that are hard for people are easy for the computer, and things that are hard for the computer, any child can understand.

Even seemingly innocuous housecleaning robots create maps of your home. That is information you want to make sure you control.

The Turing Test was a brilliant idea, but it's evolved into a competition of chatbots.

My dream is to achieve AI for the common good.

I'm trying to use AI to make the world a better place. To help scientists. To help us communicate more effectively with machines and collaborate with them.

A.I. should not be weaponized, and any A.I. must have an impregnable 'off switch.'

There are many valid concerns about AI, from its impact on jobs to its uses in autonomous weapons systems and even to the potential risk of superintelligence.

I don't think that all the coal miners - or even more realistically, say, the truck drivers whose jobs may be put out by self-driving cars and trucks - they're all going to go and become web designers and programmers.

Because of their exceptional ability to automatically elicit, record, and analyze information, A.I. systems are in a prime position to acquire confidential information.

I love sophisticated algorithms that help consumers in a tangible way.

I think it's important for us to have a rule that if a system is really an AI bot, it ought to be labeled as such. 'AI inside.' It shouldn't pretend to be a person. It's bad enough to have a person calling you and harassing you, or emailing you. What if they're bots? An army of bots constantly haranguing you - that's terrible.

Scientists need the infrastructure for scientific search to aid their research, and they need it to offer relevancy and ways to separate the wheat from the chaff - the useful from the noise - via AI-enabled algorithms. With AI, such an infrastructure would be able to identify the exact study a scientist needs from the tens of thousands on a topic.

I'm not a big fan of self-driving cars where there's no steering wheel or brake pedal. Knowing what I know about computer vision and AI, I'd be pretty uncomfortable with that. But I am a fan of a combined system - one that can brake for you if you fall asleep at the wheel, for example.

The biggest reason we want autonomous cars is to prevent accidents.

The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals and have its own will and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game.

What are we going to do as automation increases, as computers get more sophisticated? One thing that people say is we'll retrain people, right? We'll take coal miners and turn them into data miners. Of course, we do need to retrain people technically. We need to increase technical literacy, but that's not going to work for everybody.

Netbot was the first comparison shopping company. We realized comparison shopping can be quite tedious if you are driving from one furniture store to another. On the Internet, you can automatically look at a bunch of different stores and see where can you get the best price on a computer or some such thing, so that was the motivation.

When there are hiring decisions and promotion decisions to be made, people are hungry for data.

Some people have proposed universal basic income, UBI, basically making sure that everybody gets a certain amount of money to live off of. I think that's a wonderful idea. The problem is, we haven't been able to guarantee universal healthcare in this country.

Machines and people are both necessary for Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google, and neither is sufficient on its own.

To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations.