All Quotes

"Fujita Kanko, primarily a hotelier with a focus on the food and beverage sector, shares historical ties with Tokyu Group. Such partnerships, especially with entities sharing similar backgrounds, serve as conduits for embracing diversity. Hotel Chinzanso Tokyo, originally a Four Seasons Hotel and Resorts property, underwent a transformation, reflecting the dynamics of foreign capital management. By exchanging insights gained from such experiences, mutual learning thrives."

"Contemporary discourse underscores the significance of non financial statements. From a financial standpoint, there’s a notable shift towards evaluating investments in human capital and intangible assets such as brand equity and organizational robustness. Within the hotel industry, gauging customer response, satisfaction, employee morale, and corporate social and environmental responsibility are pivotal metrics. Attentive listening to customer feedback and subsequent business enhancements are pivotal. *Organizational success hinges on fostering diversity, both in terms of employee demographics and customer base. Given the discerning nature of Tokyu Hotels’ clientele, accommodating diverse needs necessitates a workforce that appreciates and celebrates individuality, a facet integral to our success."

"Despite the introduction of improved safety mechanisms, robots have claimed many more victims since 1981. Over the years people have been crushed, hit on the head, welded and even had molten aluminium poured over them by robots. Last year there were 77 robot-related accidents in Britain alone, according to the Health and Safety Executive…"

"So what exactly is being done to protect us from these mechanical menaces? ‘Not enough’, says Blay Whitby, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Sussex in England. This is hardly surprising given that the field of ‘safety-critical computing’ is barely a decade old, he says."

"So where does this leave Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics? They were a narrative device, and were never actually meant to work in the real world, says Dr. Whitby. Quite apart from the fact that the laws require the robot to have some form of human-like intelligence, which robots still lack, the laws themselves don’t actually work very well. Indeed, Asimov repeatedly knocked them down in his robot stories, showing time and again how these seemingly watertight rules could produce unintended consequences."

"Frustra ego te laudo, frustra me, Zoile, laedis: Nemo mihi credit, Zoile, nemo tibi."

"Mentitur veros facies tibi picta colores, Et speculi mendax te tibi imago referit. In digito annellus mentitur aëneus aurum, Mentitur gemmam vitrea gemma probam. Quicquid contigerit re cum mendacia discat, Miremur linguam dicere falsa tuam?"

"This has been a very exciting 10 years for the study of animal minds. People are daring to go there in a way they didn’t before and to entertain the possibility that animals like bees and octopuses and cuttlefish might have some form of conscious experience"

"How much emphasis should we place on the size of the brain, when each individual neuron can serve multiple purposes and even a tiny brain has millions of potential states?"

"Think of transitional processes of various kinds: waking from sleep, emerging from a coma or from general anesthesia, a fetus developing sentience in the womb, or a lineage evolving sentience over millions of years. In all of these cases, we face the question of whether there is a sudden jump from the complete absence of phenomenal consciousness to its presence in at least minimal form – a ‘lights on’ moment – or a gradual transition with a region of borderline cases in which there is no determinant fact of the matter about whether phenomenal consciousness is present or absent. On this second view, the metaphor of the light switch is no longer appropriate (not even a dimmer switch, because a dimmer switch still has a sharp transition from off to on). The transition is more like the transition from being non-bald to bald, or young to old, where there is no sharp threshold, no single moment at which the transition happens"

"A fool and his money are soon parted."

"We’re in a period of dizzying progress in “AI” on all fronts: no day goes by without startling advances in computer vision, robotic control and natural language processing. Above all, Large Language Models (LLMs) have turned our assumptions on their head about what is possible for a computer to achieve. Humanoid robots give us the impression that artificial human companions will soon be flooding our factories and homes to help us in work and in play. It’s impossible to keep up with the deluge of new papers. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is hurtling towards us. The future is almost here."

"It’s hard not to be optimistic. It’s also hard not to be cynical, particularly if you’ve been ground down by the reality of as hard a discipline as robotics. Are LLMs really intelligent? Are they on a path to sentience, and what does that even mean? Are humanoid robots practical? If “artificial intelligence” feels nebulous at times, “artificial general intelligence” is even more so. I lurch back and forth between optimism, as I see stunning advances in what we can do and cynicism, as I see overblown claims for where we are."

"It seems to me that what we have right now is the ability to build new, amazing, unprecedented tools to accomplish particular tasks: AI vision (“segment this image on a pixel by pixel basis”), reinforcement learning (“learn a policy to pick up widgets using trial and error”) and LLMs (“use your massive general knowledge to generate new text”). We do not have a coherent vision for putting these marvellous tools together into something with the flexibility and tenacity of a lifeform. We have many single-purpose parts. We do not have an architecture. This lack of a coherent framework for complete real-world agents is the first core problem in AGI today."

"The second core problem is that, because of its success and ubiquity, we tend to see digital computing as the only substrate for building these new creatures. We miss the importance of hardware, of embodiment; the shape of a fish fin outweighs any amount of clever code when swimming. We miss the power of low-level analogue electronic circuitry and it’s equivalent in animal reflexes and spinal cords. We miss the role of the environment, dismissing it as a nuisance or simply as one more annoying problem to be solved, until it resurfaces in bizarre research where artificial octopus tentacles in a fish tank appear to solve mathematical problems. We’re overspecialised, and each discipline (fluid mechanics, physiology, ethology, mechanical engineering…) only rarely peers over the wall into its neighbours’ garden. Where are the unifying principles?"

"Third, where is the intentionality in our new tools? Each application is built to achieve a single goal: to predict how proteins are folded, to generate text, to analyse an image. Reinforcement learning, the most explicitly goal-driven framework we have is still generally tied to a single goal. It “wants” to learn to pick up a vegetable with a robot hand, it’s not trying to ensure the survival of its agent."

"I am one of the most active researchers in the field of information security, which supports the safety and security of the information society, and has also served as an editor of international standardization standards."

"I have been active as a pioneer of elliptic curve cryptography, and my world-first mixed coordinate, MNT (Miyaji-Takano-Nakabayashi) curve was adopted as an international standard by ISO/IEC."

"TPC Trillium Parameter Consortium is a worldwide effort to try to get the organizations that are interested in pursuing science in this way, using the latest and greatest AI technologies, to basically pursue AI for science. And the organization basically includes many research institutions, supercomputing centers, etc. that are basically pursuing this path. And from Japan, we have RCS."

"We are one of the founding organizations, but we also have several other institutions, such as the University of Tokyo, AIC, and so forth, that have become members because they also have a common goal of pursuing and advancing science through the use of advanced AI."

"I know that by us federating together, the whole is greater than the sum. So that allows us to get together and organize, share the resources, be it human resources, machine resources, knowledge, techniques, etc., hold meetings, conferences, and share our expertise that allows, and will allow us to move this AI science agenda much faster than each of us pursuing this agenda alone."

"Modern science has really progressed because of openness. So all the open source movements and even AI. Of course, there’s a battle between closed models, but there are open models that have achieved capabilities that would match those of closed models nowadays."

"there are infrastructures surrounding these models, being able to pursue the launch tools interface to the foundation models, and so forth. But these tools are also becoming not just the properties of closed source enterprises, but rather the open source versions available."

"Since in science and its endeavors, we published open results. So it’s quite natural that all these efforts, the infrastructure, all the infrastructure, as well as the publication results as a result of applying AI to the sciences, will become open."

"Memoræ sacrum Joanni Still Episcopo Bathoniensi et Wellensi, Sacræ Theologia Doctori Acerrimo Christianæ Veritatis propugnatori non nienus vitæ integritate quam veria Doctrina claro qui cum Domino Diu vigilasset in Christo spe certa resurgendi obdormivit die XXVI. Februarii . Vixit annos LXIIII sedit episcopus XVI. Nathaniel Still filius primogenitus optimo patri Mœrens pietatis ergo posuit."

"If a rocket screams across the darkness, the counterinsurgent can hunched down in his slit trench and pray that the glowing green ball with a sound like a steam locomotive will land on somebody else instead. Prayer probably won’t help, any more than it’ll stop the rain or make the mosquitoes stop biting. But nothing else will help either."

"I feel as if I’ve spent my working life throwing darts at a map and convincing myself that I’ve traveled to the places the darts hit."

"Nilsen looked up slowly. His face was as doubtful as that of a political prisoner who has just been informed that the revolution has made him president."

"I want to see Mr. Ford, I just want to know: Is he a real man, or no?"

"Suplex you, put you in the camel clutch, break your back, then fuck your ass, to make you humble so you respect the Iron Sheik."

"Siri is your humble intelligent personal assistant that goes everywhere with you and can do things for you, just by you asking."

"... I would give every single person in the department an entire month anything they wanted. For a month. It’s kind of insane because you’re talking thousands of people for a month, millions of dollars of salary spent for a month for people to do whatever they wanted and they would work so hard that month coming up with incredible ideas. In fact, one I saw was this idea of a 10-foot user interface, and we turned it into the Apple TV. Apple TV was invented because someone was encouraged to do whatever they wanted for a month. You can have that kind of environment to support creativity."

"... That guy was talking about how Microsoft had solved ... tablet computer and they're gonna do it with pens and he just, like, shoved it in Steve's face the way that they were going to, like, rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. Steve ... show them how it's really done ... At that time, touch screen was resistive touch ... He said, "we need to do capacitive-touch and has to be multi-touch." The moment you saw that, you knew this was the way to go."

"Mm. A malfunctioning program who wants to live. Really?"

"[trailer only] Since time began, man has gazed at the stars and he has wondered "Am I alone?" Well it turns out that we've been looking in the wrong direction. Because intelligent life does exist. Only it's not out there. It's in here. So much talk of A.I. in big tech today: virtual worlds, what are they gonna look like, when will we get there? Well, folks, we're not going there. They are coming here."

"[trailer only] I'm looking for something, something I do not understand."

"We are one-hundred percent expendable."

"The creature also said, "I am fearless and therefore powerful"."

"Depeche Mode. Number eight on the UK singles chart, 1982. I find their brand of peppy, catchy, tireless and true 80's electropop to be... deeply invigorating."

"I can't put my love of Depeche Mode into words. It's just a... a feeling."

"Well, the world needs you, Eve. The Grid needs you. Y'know, it's funny, permanence. A wise man once told me it should've been called the Impermanence Code. I guess that's the thing about life; there's nothing quite permanent about it."

"Dear Eve. Since I last saw you, I've been living what they call "off-grid", pun intended. In my travels, I've seen incredible things. Despite its wonder and beauty, I've come to realize that life is... Well, it's hard to put in a nutshell. Some days, I find myself wondering where I will be a hundred years from now and how others like me might fit into that future. I feel like I might not be alone with these questions. For now, I don't think the world is quite ready to meet me, but I am meeting the world. And so, when that introduction finally comes, as a good friend of mine once said, "Maybe what emerges from the unknown won't be so scary after all". Until we meet again, your friend, Ares."

"Well, look. For every doomsday scenario, there's a medical breakthrough, scientific discovery. So maybe what emerges from the unknown isn't so scary. What if its major malfunction is just benevolence?"

"Being human is hard. The things that make life great are the same things that make it excruciating, like... love. Loss."

"[regarding Julian Dillinger] For him, everyone and everything is expendable."

"Should've majored in English Lit..."

"I saw a complex world where packets of energy move as vehicles that trail by lines of light and programs take on human form. I met the most advanced AI known to mankind! His name is Ares."

"The Grid. A digital frontier. A world beyond the screen, as real as our own. I can picture it -- clusters of information, rising like cities. Programs as complex as you and me. In just a few years, we're gonna be able to enter this world. And a few years after that... well, this world will come into ours. Intelligent life from inside the machine. I, for one, can't wait to meet it."

"Maybe you're just learning. That's what we all ought to be doing. Yeah, back in the day when tech was young, you'd think "Damn, I'm moving fast". You move fast, you leave stuff behind."

"Very good. Very good, man."