All Quotes

"Recorded memories tend to freeze and reinforce the nature of their subject. The more memories we accumulate and externalize, the more narrative constraints we provide for the construction and development of our personal identities. Increasing our memories also means decreasing the degree of freedom we might enjoy in redefining ourselves. Forgetting is part of the process of self-construction. A potential solution, for generations to come, may be to be thriftier with anything that tends to crystallize the nature of the self, and more adept in handling new or refined skills of self-construction. Capturing."

"Human beings differ from other animals because they are sufficiently intelligent to wish that they could stop working and reasoning – and free enough to toil harder than other creatures to pursue both these aims in order to eventually enjoy free time. It follows that Homo faber and Homo sapiens are only contingent consequences of the truly essential Homo ludens. The fact that philosophers do not typically endorse this view only clarifies why they rarely qualify as champions of common sense."

"The great opportunity offered by ICTs comes with a huge intellectual responsibility to understand them and take advantage of them in the right way."

"The design of good interfaces takes time and ingenuity"

"In short, human intelligent design (pun intended) should play a major role in shaping the future of our interactions with each other, with forthcoming technological artefacts, and with the infosphere we share among us and with them. After all, it is a sign of intelligence to make stupidity work for you."

"When technologies are in-between human users and natural prompters, we may qualify them as first-order (Figure 13). Listing first-order technologies is simple. The ones mentioned earlier all qualify. More can easily be added, such as the plough, the wheel, or the umbrella. The axe is probably the first and oldest kind of first-order technology. Nowadays, a wood-splitting axe is still a first-order technology between you, the user, and the wood, the prompter. A saddle is between you and a horse"

"We’re fast and furious with these technologies that are at a scale and power that’s beyond our current moral capacities, I think right now we have a really great mismatch between the power of our tools and our wisdom to use them well."

"We all have an innate desire to do something for humanity"

"Human values don’t exist in isolation, It’s not like there’s privacy over here, and trust over there, and security there."

"At the time, if you did any search on values and computing or anything related to that, you would come up with nothing. It just was not on people’s radars"

"I wanted to do my work from within computing. I wanted to do it as an insider, not as an outside critic, to provide leadership for the field."

"Maybe there are things in 20 or 50 years that you’re going to want to know about the present, so you need to collect them now, The people who start the work are not going to be the people who finish the work."

"I feel a great sense of satisfaction, Others are taking these ideas, theoretical constructs, methods, and practices — applying and extending them in their own ways and own contexts. And that’s when you know you’ve contributed to shifts in the world."

"My scholarly and technical work is about creating the conditions to make the world a better place — a place for human flourishing and for a flourishing planet, My art is about beauty and form — in effect, creating the peace that I hope we will all experience when we arrive there."

"Food is an indispensable factor to the health and strength of a people in time of war or time of peace. It deserves a most important consideration in the planning of our national defense."

"My place is here. I cannot in conscience abandon my work and my girls."

"Eat well, consume nutritious foods such as meat, eggs and milk, if available in the morning. Don't overexert yourself and get enough sleep."

"The idea was to democratize access to Professor Floridi’s work, “The issues he has written about touch everyone’s lives, and more and more people are becoming aware of AI. LuFlot provides an AI-driven platform for much broader engagement with the ethical questions surrounding this transformative technology."

"Anyone, regardless of their knowledge of AI, can visit the website, ask a question, and have a conversation with the founder of the philosophy of information, I think that’s remarkable."

"Ricky is technically brilliant"

"Our goal is finding ways to harmonize human agency and creativity with AI-enabled structural support, That involves incorporating AI tools into the writing process without inhibiting people’s agency. It’s not about using the chatbot to write essays. It’s about using this technology to deepen your knowledge and sharpen your creativity and critical thinking skills."

"Our mandate is to ensure sustainable exploitation of our petroleum resources, among other extractives that we have as a country, as well as to ensure we are improving on our access to clean energy while ensuring that it is affordable and reliable."

"20 years ago, our electrification rate was at 10%. Electricity is a key driver for creating a positive business environment. Many strides have been taken, and thanks to the efforts of His Excellency the President and the rest of the government, just in the last 20 years we’ve jumped from 10% to 57%."

"Our petroleum industry is being developed in a sustainable manner when it comes to environmental and social governance, and this includes the issues around land acquisition. We go through comprehensive resettlement action planning, where all compensations are approved by the chief government valuer, and then we proceed to pay the project affected persons."

"Today, our transmission networks are constrained. Our system is struggling in many areas. We continue to experience energy losses, although they are on a decline compared to 20 years ago, so we’ll be looking to invest more in our transmission network. Additionally, the new Electricity (Amendment) Act of 2022 removed the single-buyer mode, where our national utility company, Uganda Electricity Transmission, was the sole buyer for all power generated in the country."

"I think the reason there’s been a decline in elite or expertise has been more of a populist movement. A good amount of the people feels they have been left behind by the world order. I think that would be much more important than technology"

"I don’t think it’s a battle that is decisively won and we don’t have to worry about it again, but I think there are enough resources and assets being thrown against this problem that I would like to think it will be a match for the worst and most egregious form of information warfare"

"It's not OK to violate the laws of this country. We have millions of people standing in line, taking the test, doing their background investigation, paying the fees that want to come in the right way."

"We made a promise to the American people. President Trump has made a promise to the American people. We're going to make this country safe again."

"There's $50,000 out there somewhere, there's audio of Homan accepting the bag with the $50,000. But, Karoline Leavitt ... said on the record, "Mr. Homan never took the $50,000 you were referring to." ... Where is the money now? Is it in his bank account? Did he give it back? What happened? Did he not take it? Like, there are just so many questions here. I am not suggesting that Homan did something illegal ... A guy who has a central role in the critial issue of Donald Trump's 2nd term, immigration and the border, we believe, according to the audio by the FBI, took $50,000 from an undercover FBI agent, thinking they were a government contractor seeking to get in his good graces to secure government contracts on immigration, when ... and if Donald Trump won. Where's the money?"

"I’ve always been interested in what it means to be human, and in the nature of the universe. I did my undergraduate [degree] in AI and my master’s in AI, and my Ph.D. in AI, so I guess I’ve been doing 19 years’ worth of activity in AI."

"There are two definitions of AI, and the more popular one is the weakest. This first definition [concerns] machines that can do tasks that were traditionally in the realm of human beings. Over the past decade, due to advances in technologies like deep learning, we have started to build machines that can do things like recognize objects in images, and understand and respond to natural language. Humans are the most intelligent things we know in the universe, so when we start to see machines do tasks once constrained to the human domain, then we assume that is intelligence.But I would argue that humans are not that intelligent. Humans are good at finding patterns in, at most, four dimensions, and we’re terrible at solving problems that involve more than seven things. Machines can find patterns in thousands of dimensions and can solve problems that involve millions of things. Even these technologies aren’t AI — they’re just algorithms. They do the same thing over and over again. In fact, my definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result."

"The best definition of intelligence — artificial or human — that I’ve found is goal-directed adaptive behavior. I use goal-directed in the sense of trying to achieve an objective, which in business might be to roster your staff more effectively, or to allocate marketing spend to sell as [much] ice cream as possible. It might be whatever goal you’re seeking."

"There are four categories of AI skills. The first category is the data. Companies should ask: Are we getting our data into the shape where people can consume it? There are lots of companies out there that are throwing money at building data lakes — that’s all the raw data that a company holds from code generation to sales information — because they think at some point in the future data lakes will be useful. That’s not a bad investment, but I would also suggest that you need to be building applications straight away on top of that data lake that drive value into your business. Companies…should be thinking about building digital twins of their organizations, i.e., a perfect digital representation of their physical assets, like their infrastructure and employees."

"Next is recruiting data scientists who have the machine learning and statistics skills to find insights from the data. Then, the third is [finding] what I call the decision scientists: people who can understand how to make decisions or solve optimization problems that leverage those insights."

"And fourth, crucially, for true AI, you need to have an AI architect who understands how to glue these three components together: the data, the machine learning, and the optimization to build adaptive systems. And at the moment, it’s the CIO who is trying to step into that role of overseeing this. But I don’t know of many companies out there that have true AI architects. For now, companies are managing maybe part of this, but not all four categories."

"Digital twins are the next evolution of digital transformation. To be able to adapt more quickly to a changing world, companies need to create a digital replica of all of their physical assets, their infrastructure and people. Once you have a twin, you can start to run experiments and simulate scenarios to operate your business more effectively. Further down the line we may even have AI setting those experiments, and running experiments without the aid of the human. The role of the strategist and of leadership is to develop a strong vision and purpose, i.e., [determining] what key objective the organization needs to aspire to. I hope that organizations will realize that this objective needs to be much more sophisticated than a financial return to be able to attract, empower, and motivate talent. Exceptional talent wants to align with a strong purpose and inspirational leaders."

"There is a bit of a bubble in AI. I don’t think that it’s going to go to waste. I think that all this investment will be additive, but there’s an over-expectation of what machine learning can bring right now, because of a lack of appreciation of the fact that machine learning is only part of the journey. And the next part of the journey for most big companies is optimization and decision making."

"As [futurist] Roy Amara noted, the impact of technology tends to be overestimated in the short run and underestimated in the long run. For now, you can probably ignore the idea of having adaptive systems in your business. That will come later. In the short run, you can use AI to remove the friction of mundane and repetitive tasks across the organization. If used correctly, this can absolutely change your business. But there’s a lot of hype out there, and a lot of people investing in these technologies don’t know what they’re doing."

"The world is changing so quickly, it’s very difficult to actually have all the necessary data points to be able to help you forecast accurately. At the moment, that’s still in the realm of human beings."

"I’m hoping to make sure that superintelligence we are creating right now does not kill everyone."

"The last decade we actually figured out how to make artificial intelligence better. Turns out if you add more compute, more data, it just kind of becomes smarter. And so now, smartest people in the world, billions of dollars, all going to create the best possible super intelligence we can."

"Unfortunately, while we know how to make those systems much more capable, we don’t know how to make them safe, how to make sure they don’t do something we will regret. And that’s the state of the art right now."

"When we look at just prediction markets, how soon will we get to advanced AI? The timelines are very short. Couple of years, two, three years, according to prediction markets, according to CEOs of Top Labs. And at the same time, we don’t know how to make sure that those systems are aligned with our preferences."

"It gives me a great opportunity to direct what I am so passionate about – promoting human dignity of poor and vulnerable populations around the world."

"So we are creating this alien intelligence. If aliens were coming to Earth and you had three years to prepare, you would be panicking right now. But most people don’t even realize this is happening."

"I am glad you ran a thread through these works. Maybe it’s just that things are more interesting where worlds intersect. Whether this is where the water’s edge meets the land or when the circus rolls into a small town. On the edge is where relationships and juxtaposition can be complicated and hopefully more visually interesting."

"I do tell myself when working technically that I’m working on the edge. For some reason, I like to come up with elaborate schemes to produce images. These seem like great ideas in my head, but often in practice don’t work out."

"My equipment tends to be more on the edge, also. Cameras with multiple lenses and shutter, hand held 5×7 and 8×10 cameras, pinhole and fingerprint cameras."

"I had done the airshow as straight black and white to print. I probably shot the show ten years in a row. I was trying to move beyond the straight prints and I was thinking more about the real sculptural affect that the contrails make as the airplanes were flying. I was trying to make a more three-dimension effect for the images. I started shooting it with a 5 x 7 camera, knowing that I wanted to do some contact prints, originally thinking that they might be platinum, or something like that. I was at an antique image show in Chicago and ran by an Orotone print that someone was selling. Not knowing if I had ever seen one before, I was pretty blown away by it. I asked the seller, What is this? and he said, An Orotone print. And I asked him, How do you make these? And he looked at me and he said, How would I know?"