Quotes About Progress

It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league.

Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.

history does not tolerate a vacuum. If incidences of famine, plague and war are decreasing, something is bound to take their place on the human agenda. We

As of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife. Even in Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997 to create a legal category of marital rape.5

The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man. It's

Una de las pocas leyes rigurosas de la historia es que los lujos tienden a convertirse en necesidades y a generar nuevas obligaciones.

Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers. And

Consequently, despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new useless class. We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor. Many people might share the fate not of nineteenth-century wagon drivers, who switched to driving taxis, but of nineteenth-century horses, who were increasingly pushed out of the job market altogether.15

In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, and in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero.

La historia es algo que ha hecho muy poca gente mientras que todos los demás araban los campos y acarreaban barreños de agua.

despite the numerous shortcomings of the liberal package, it has a much better record than any of its alternatives

We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.

When we adopt the proverbial bird's-eye view of history, which examines developments in terms of decades or centuries, it's hard to say whether history moves in the direction of unity or of diversity.

Consider Google. Google wants to reach a point where we can ask it anything and get the best answer in the world. What

La domesticación de los animales se basaba en una serie de prácticas brutales que con el paso de los siglos se hicieron todavía más crueles.

The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.

patient. Therefore we will probably have an AI family doctor on our smartphone decades before we have a reliable nurse robot.9 The human care industry—which takes care of the sick, the young, and the elderly—is likely to remain a human bastion for a long time.

The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of 'improvements', each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers.

Cuanto más hemos trabajado para construir algo, más difícil es abandonarlo y hacer sitio a algo nuevo.

Predicting that humankind will try to gain immortality, bliss and divinity is much like predicting that people building a house will want a lawn in their front yard. It sounds very likely. But once you say it out loud, you can begin to think about alternatives.

The prevailing feeling is that too many opportunities are opening too quickly and that our ability to modify genes is outpacing our capacity for making wise and farsighted use of the skill.

When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new 'niches for imbeciles' were opened up.

We therefore have a good chance of overcoming the problem of resource scarcity. The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In

In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we have only this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens.