Quotes from Susan Schneider

I won't be indulging in anger anymore, vehemently and self-righteously singing protest songs, and expecting them to bring peace to me or anyone else.

I always meant to convey a message of peace and harmony, and thought I was choosing my songs accordingly.

Mentally tease apart the threads that keep you connected to your mother. See that those threads, those feelings, that you experience with her are what find the two of you -- but they do not have to weave the tapestry of your entire life.

The mother needs mothering too.

Anything she says will be ok with him -- this she feels instinctively. She looks up and meets his eyes: eagle against the sky, his eyes boring into her. He leans over and kisses her, first lightly, then his arms circles her waist and his hand grasps a shoulder blade, pulling her up and closer. Inside her a diamond, the glittering spot where her feelings have solidified into the hardest substance on earth, catches fire and melts.

Nature is medicine for the soul, Miss Rolston.

For if we are not careful, we may experience one or more perverse realizations of AI technology—situations in which AI fails to make life easier but instead leads to our own suffering or demise, or to the exploitation of other conscious beings.

And if an AI is a conscious being, forcing it to serve us would be akin to slavery.

In the long term, the tables may turn on humans, and the problem may not be what we could do to harm AIs, but what AI might do to harm us.

If superintelligent machines are not conscious, either because it's impossible or because they aren't designed to be, we could be in trouble.

Even if AI surpasses us intellectually, we still may stand out in a crucial dimension: it feels like something to be us.

For instance, if AI cannot be conscious, then if you substituted a microchip for the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness, you would end your life as a conscious being.

According to a recent survey, for instance, the most-cited AI researchers expect AI to "carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human" within a 50 percent probability by 2050, and within a 90 percent probability by 2070.

Kurzweil and other transhumanists contend that we are fast approaching a "technological singularity," a point at which AI far surpasses human intelligence and is capable of solving problems we weren't able to solve before, with unpredictable consequences for civilization and human nature.

I plan to write more songs of my own, especially on behalf of the animals we needlessly raise for food, at their great expense, and at great expense to our precious, deteriorating planet.