Susan Schneider

"Nature is medicine for the soul, Miss Rolston"

"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."

"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"

"The mother needs mothering too"

"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"

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

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

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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.”"

"The development of AI is driven by market forces and the defense industry—billions of dollars are now pouring into constructing smart household assistants, robot supersoldiers, and supercomputers that mimic the workings of the human brain."