Quotes from Oren Etzioni

We have an obligation to figure out how to help people cope with the rapidly changing nature of technology.

Machine learning is looking for patterns in data. If you start with racist data, you will end up with even more racist models. This is a real problem.

Driverless cars are a great thing.

Israel is a wonderful place to grow up.

Automation has emerged as a bigger threat to American jobs than globalization or immigration combined.

People thrive on genuine connections - not with machines, but with each other. You don't want a robot taking care of your baby; an ailing elder needs to be loved, to be listened to, fed, and sung to. This is one job category that people are - and will continue to be - best at.

If you step back a little and say we want to do A.I., then you will realize that A.I. needs knowledge, reasoning, and explanation.

When you think of driverless cars, there's a huge potential for these cars to save lives by preventing accidents and by reducing congestion on highways.

Our highways and our roads are underutilized because of the allowances we have to make for human drivers.

Instead of expecting truck drivers and warehouse workers to rapidly retrain so they can compete with tireless, increasingly capable machines, let's play to their human strengths and create opportunities for workers as companions and caregivers for our elders, our children, and our special-needs population.

The truth is that behind any AI program that works is a huge amount of, A, human ingenuity and, B, blood, sweat and tears. It's not the kind of thing that suddenly takes off like 'Her' or in 'Ex Machina.'

Life is short. Don't do the same thing everyone else is doing - that's such a herd mentality. And don't do something that's two percent better than the other person. Do something that changes the world.

I'm not so worried about super-intelligence and 'Terminator' scenarios. Frankly I think those are quite farfetched.

If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI.

We don't want A.I. to engage in cyberbullying, stock manipulation, or terrorist threats; we don't want the F.B.I. to release A.I. systems that entrap people into committing crimes. We don't want autonomous vehicles that drive through red lights, or worse, A.I. weapons that violate international treaties.

Things that are so hard for people, like playing championship-level Go and poker, have turned out to be relatively easy for the machines. Yet at the same time, the things that are easiest for a person - like making sense of what they see in front of them, speaking in their mother tongue - the machines really struggle with.

AI is a tool. The choice about how it gets deployed is ours.

I could do a whole talk on the question of is AI dangerous.' My response is that AI is not going to exterminate us. It's a tool that's going to empower us.

A calculator is a tool for humans to do math more quickly and accurately than they could ever do by hand; similarly, AI computers are tools for us to perform tasks too difficult or expensive for us to do on our own, such as analyzing large data sets or keeping up to date on medical research.

Just as our roads and bridges are overdue for investment, so is the infrastructure for scientific research; that is, the body of scientific thought and the tools for searching through it.

It's hard for me to speculate about what motivates somebody like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk to talk so extensively about AI. I'd have to guess that talking about black holes gets boring after awhile - it's a slowly developing topic.

I became interested in AI in high school because I read 'Goedel, Escher, Bach,' a book by Douglas Hofstader. He showed how all their work in some ways fit together, and he talked about artificial intelligence. I thought 'Wow, this is what I want to be doing.'

AI works really well when you couple AI in a raisin bread model. AI is the raisins, but you wrap it in a good user interface and product design, and that's the bread. If you think about raisin bread, it's not raisin bread without the raisins. Right? Then it's just bread, but it's also not raisin bread without the bread. Then it's just raisins.

The best students are ones that are willing to take intellectual risks and challenge conventional thinking.