Artificial intelligence

"... artificial intelligence is nothing more than a giant modernity parrot, containing zero wisdom. It is a tool that serves the capitalist market system quite well as people scramble to monetize its mediocre capability, resulting in more exploitation of the natural world. Nothing about it is causing people to scale back, or to recognize the error of our ways. Why would the Human Reich use any such tool to dismantle itself?"

"The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I'm not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast... Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast — it is growing at a pace close to exponential."

"Here we have senior representatives of a powerful and unconscionably rich industry – plus their supporters and colleagues in elite research labs across the world – who are on the one hand mesmerised by the technical challenges of building a technology that they believe might be an , while at the same time calling for governments to regulate it. But the thought that never seems to enter what might be called their minds is the question that any child would ask: if it is so dangerous, why do you continue to build it? Why not stop and do something else? Or at the very least, stop releasing these products into the wild?"

"Some years later I spoke to a mentally disturbed young man. Very agitatedly, he described to me how alien beings from outer space had invaded the earth. They were formed of mental substance, lived in human minds, and controlled human beings through the creations of science and technology. Eventually this alien being would have an autonomous existence in the form of giant computers and would no longer require humans–and that would mark its triumph and the end of humanity. Soon he was hospitalized because he was unable to shake off this terrible vision."

"Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as artificial flowers have to flowers. From a distance they may appear much alike, but when closely examined they are quite different. I don’t think we can learn much about one by studying the other."

"Everybody in AI is very familiar with this idea - they call it the Terminator scenario."

"A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God."

"I think “superintelligence” is like “superpower.” Anyone can define “superpower” as “flight, superhuman strength, X-ray vision, heat vision, cold breath, super-speed, enhance hearing, and nigh-invulnerability.” Anyone could imagine it, and recognize it when he or she sees it. But that does not mean that there exists a highly advanced physiology called “superpower” that is possessed by refugees from Krypton! It does not mean that anabolic steroids, because they increase speed and strength, can be “scaled” to yield superpowers. And a skeptic who makes these points is not quibbling over the meaning of the word superpower, nor would he or she balk at applying the word upon meeting a real-life Superman. Their point is that we almost certainly will never, in fact, meet a real-life Superman. That’s because he’s defined by human imagination, not by an understanding of how things work."

"Precisely because I feel called to continue in this vein, I thought of taking the name Leo XIV. There are several reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII, with his historic encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution, and today the Church offers everyone its heritage of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence, which pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and work."

"As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership."

"Can those who believe the computer is "an embodiment of mind" really not tell the difference between so poorly a caricature and the true original?"

"I wonder whether or when artificial intelligence will ever crash the barrier of meaning."

"The struggle is not whether AI is good or bad. It's who controls it and who benefits from it. That is really the the fundamental issue in my view."

"When you’re fundraising, it’s AI / When you’re hiring, it’s ML / When you’re implementing, it’s linear regression / When you’re debugging, it’s printf()"

"There is probably no more abused a term in the history of philosophy than “representation,” and my use of this term differs both from its use in traditional philosophy and from its use in contemporary cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.... The sense of “representation” in question is meant to be entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts: the sense of “represent” in which a belief represents its conditions of satisfaction is the same sense in which a statement represents its conditions of satisfaction. To say that a belief is a representation is simply to say that it has a propositional content and a psychological mode."

"We define a semantic network as "the collection of all the relationships that concepts have to other concepts, to percepts, to procedures, and to motor mechanisms" of the knowledge"."

"When AI takes on a human shape, that’s where we see biases. We should not forget that this technology can take on any form we choose for it, and I’d personally prefer that its incarnations not take place on the surface of the female body."

"In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequently with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing."

"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."

"My son was one of a kind. You are the first of a kind. David?"

"The techniques of artificial intelligence are to the mind what bureaucracy is to human social interaction."

"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."

"Many researchers… expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.” It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers."

"AI was the futuristic topic that almost no one really appeared to understand but everyone was discussing"

"In a debate I hosted at Stanford in 2018, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel used a memorable aphorism: "AI is Communist, crypto is libertarian." TikTok validates the first half of that. In the late 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese children denounced their parents for rightist deviance. In 2020, when American teenagers posted videos of themselves berating their parents for racism, they did it on TikTok."

"Barack Obama: My general observation is that it has been seeping into our lives in all sorts of ways, and we just don’t notice; and part of the reason is because the way we think about AI is colored by popular culture. There’s a distinction, which is probably familiar to a lot of your readers, between generalized AI and specialized AI. In science fiction, what you hear about is generalized AI, right? Computers start getting smarter than we are and eventually conclude that we’re not all that useful, and then either they’re drugging us to keep us fat and happy or we’re in the Matrix. My impression, based on talking to my top science advisers, is that we’re still a reasonably long way away from that. It’s worth thinking about because it stretches our imaginations and gets us thinking about the issues of choice and free will that actually do have some significant applications for specialized AI, which is about using algorithms and computers to figure out increasingly complex tasks. We’ve been seeing specialized AI in every aspect of our lives, from medicine and transportation to how electricity is distributed, and it promises to create a vastly more productive and efficient economy. If properly harnessed, it can generate enormous prosperity and opportunity. But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages."

"Barack Obama: Let me start with what I think is the more immediate concern—it’s a solvable problem in this category of specialized AI, and we have to be mindful of it. If you’ve got a computer that can play Go, a pretty complicated game with a lot of variations, then developing an algorithm that lets you maximize profits on the New York Stock Exchange is probably within sight. And if one person or organization got there first, they could bring down the stock market pretty quickly, or at least they could raise questions about the integrity of the financial markets. Then there could be an algorithm that said, “Go penetrate the nuclear codes and figure out how to launch some missiles.” If that’s its only job, if it’s self-teaching and it’s just a really effective algorithm, then you’ve got problems. I think my directive to my national security team is, don’t worry as much yet about machines taking over the world. Worry about the capacity of either nonstate actors or hostile actors to penetrate systems, and in that sense it is not conceptually different than a lot of the cybersecurity work we’re doing. It just means that we’re gonna have to be better, because those who might deploy these systems are going to be a lot better now."

"Terminator: In three years, James Bandz will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with James Bandz computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."

"Sarah Connor: Skynet fights back."

"Labelers training AI say they're overworked, underpaid and exploited by big American tech companies (By Lesley Stahl 60 MINUTES November 24, 2024)"