Quotes About Technology

But we don't have much experience in regulating the ownership of data,

We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one. If and when computer programs attain superhuman intelligence and unprecedented power, should we begin valuing these programs more than we value humans? Would it be okay, for example, for an artificial intelligence to exploit humans and even kill them to further its own needs and desires? If it should never be allowed to do that, despite its superior intelligence

The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.

Rightly or wrongly, people might reach the same conclusions about Big Data algorithms: they have lots of hitches, but we have no better alternative.

we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.

A Humanidade, provavelmente, dividir-se-á em duas grandes fações: a fação das pessoas a favor de se conceder à inteligência artificial uma autoridade significativa e a fação das que se opõem a isso. O mais certo é que haja muçulmanos e judeus em ambos os lados, justificando as suas posições através de interpretações criativas do Alcorão e do Talmude.

archaeological evidence consists mainly of fossilised bones and stone tools. Artefacts made of more perishable materials – such as wood, bamboo or leather – survive only under unique conditions. The common impression that pre-agricultural humans lived in an age of stone is a misconception based on this archaeological bias. The Stone Age should more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by ancient hunter-gatherers were made of wood.

The single most remarkable and defining moment of the past 500 years came at 05:29:45 on 16 July 1945. At that precise second, American scientists detonated the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico. From that point onward, humankind had the capability not only to change the course of history, but to end it.

with the rise of AI, robots, and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labor will become far less important

The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people.

In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year. It would therefore be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans—not jobs. Displaced drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.

Biological knowledge multiplied by Computing power multiplied by Data equals Ability to Hack Humans.

b × c × d = ahh! Biological knowledge multiplied by Computing power multiplied by Data equals Ability to Hack Humans.

But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this is no longer true: Homo sapiens is transcending those limits. It is now beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design.

The hand of the market is blind as well as invisible, and left to its own devices it may fail to do anything at all about the threat of global warming or the dangerous potential of artificial intelligence.

hence few try to understand what they have signed up for. Like when you download some software and are asked to sign an accompanying contract that consists of dozens of pages of legalese—you take one look at it, immediately scroll down to the last page, tick 'I agree' and forget about it. Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

Capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralized data processing, at least in periods of accelerating changes.

Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. It is easier to manipulate a river by building a dam than it is to predict all the complex consequences this will have for the wider ecological system.

Holy scriptures may have been relevant in the Middle Ages, but how can they guide us in an era of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, global warming, and cyberwarfare? Yet secular people are a minority. Billions of humans still profess greater faith in the Quran and the Bible than in the theory of evolution; religious movements shape the politics of countries as diverse as India, Turkey, and the United States; and religious animosities fuel conflicts from Nigeria to the Philippines.

When considering automation, therefore, it is wrong to compare the abilities of a single human driver to that of a single self-driving car, or of a single human doctor to that of a single AI doctor. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.

individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network

In the end, it's a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what's happening within you better than you understand it, authority will shift to them.

In the long run, algorithms may learn how to compose entire tunes, playing on human emotions as if they were a piano keyboard. Using your biometric data, the algorithms could even produce personalized melodies, which you alone in the entire universe would appreciate.

Increasing the variety of processors. Different processors may use diverse ways to calculate and analyse data. Using several kinds of processors in a single system may therefore increase its dynamism and creativity. A conversation between a peasant, a priest and a physician may produce novel ideas that would never emerge from a conversation between three hunter-gatherers.