Computer Science

"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."

"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him."

"The ability to interact with a computer presence like you would a human assistant is becoming increasingly feasible."

"Some people have called the book [The Mythical Man-Month, 1975] the "bible of software engineering". I would agree with that in one respect: that is, everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it."

"Software engineering is an engineering discipline that is concerned with all aspects of software production from the early stages of system specification to maintaining the system after it has gone into use. In this definition, there are two key phrases:"

"Not even the most advanced form of artificial intelligence can ever replace man. Because there is something in human beings that is irreducible to machine knowledge: self-awareness, free will, doubt, feelings."

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

"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."

"Far too often, "software engineering" is neither engineering nor about software."

"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."

"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()"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Every morning, not in recent days, I see my friend who has a disability. It’s so hard for him just to do a high five; his arm with stiff muscle can’t reach out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can’t watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is. I [feel] utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself. I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves."

"Physical sexual immorality is deeply evil and brings an additional shipload of devastating consequences and fallout; but when a man engages in adultery of the heart with whatever AI happens to “think” is a woman as the object, he is making all-out war on his connection to reality in a disastrous way. …Those who offer AI the worship, trust, and belief they should be placing in the one true God will become increasingly blind, dull, senseless, stagnated, and incapable of saying anything worth hearing, as those around them are treated to the ever-ripening stench of their own self-absorption."

"... 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?"

"A century ago, we had essentially no way to start to explain how thinking works. Then psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget produced their theories about child development. Somewhat later, on the mechanical side, mathematicians like Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing began to reveal the hitherto unknown range of what machines could be made to do. These two streams of thought began to merge only in the 1940s, when Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts began to show how machines might be made to see, reason, and remember. Research in the modern science of Artificial Intelligence started only in the 1950s, stimulated by the invention of modern computers. This inspired a flood of new ideas about how machines could do what only minds had done previously."

"Any aeai [A.I., artificial intelligence] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it."

"The problems of heuristic programming—of making computers solve really difficult problems—are divided into five main areas: Search, Pattern-Recognition, Learning, Planning, and Induction. A computer can do, in a sense, only what it is told to do. But even when we do not know how to solve a certain problem, we may program a machine (computer) to Search through some large space of solution attempts. Unfortunately, this usually leads to an enormously inefficient process. With Pattern-Recognition techniques, efficiency can often be improved, by restricting the application of the machine's methods to appropriate problems. Pattern-Recognition, together with Learning, can be used to exploit generalizations based on accumulated experience, further reducing search."

"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."

"Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men"

"It is not uncommon now for AI experts to ask whether an AI is ‘fair’ and ‘for good’. …The question to pose is a deeper one: how is AI shifting power? Law enforcement, marketers, hospitals and other bodies apply artificial intelligence to decide on matters such as who is profiled as a criminal, who is likely to buy what product at what price, who gets medical treatment and who gets hired. These entities increasingly monitor and predict our behavior, often motivated by power and profits."

"A computer program written by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has come up with a major mathematical proof that would have been called creative if a human had thought of it. In doing so, the computer has, for the first time, got a toehold into pure mathematics, a field described by its practitioners as more of an art form than a science. ...Dr. McCune's proof concerns a conjecture that is the very epitome of pure mathematics. ...His computer program proved that a set of three equations is equivalent to a Boolean algebra..."

"My timeline is computers will be at human levels, such as you can have a human relationship with them, 15 years from now."

"It's important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on an intelligent, non-technical conversation (the "Turing test"), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway. To make humans superfluous, the machines will only need to outperform them in making the technical decisions that have to be made for the purpose of promoting the short-term survival and propagation of the dominant self-prop systems."

"One of the difficulties in thinking about software is its huge variety. A function definition in a spreadsheet cell is software. A smartphone app is software. The flight management system for an Airbus A380 is software. A word processor is software. We shouldn't expect a single discipline of software engineering to cover all of these, any more than we expect a single discipline of manufacturing to cover everything from the Airbus A380 to the production of chocolate bars, or a single discipline of social organization to cover everything from the United Nations to a kindergarten. Improvement in software engineering must come bottom-up, from intense specialized attention to particular products."

"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?"

"Humanity is at a crossroads. Either it returns to the belief that it has a different nature than machines or it will be reduced to a machine among machines. The risk is not that artificial intelligence will become better than us, but that we will freely decide to submit to it and its masters."

"Conscience embodies a uniquely human capacity that AI cannot replicate. While AI surpasses human computation and data processing capabilities, it cannot authentically experience empathy, make genuine moral judgments, or comprehend the pursuit of meaning."

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

"When genetic engineering and artificial intelligence reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets might become as obsolete as flint knives, tape cassettes, Islam and communism."

"I think we’re going to see AI get even better. It’s already extremely good. We’re going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs. It’s already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it’s going to be able to replace many other jobs. And then there’ll be very few people need for software engineering projects."

"AI is not going to replace physicians, but physicians who use AI are going to replace physicians who don’t."

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it."

"Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead."

"On November 5, Ruslan Perelygin, [an] opposition legislator in Oryol, used AI to create a clip showing protesters denouncing the local mayor for a variety of crimes and demanding his ouster, a creative use of new technology to protest at a time when genuine demonstrations are almost invariably illegal and subject to harsh punishments."

"It seems very likely to a large number of people that we will get massive unemployment caused by Ai."

"Recent researchers in artificial intelligence and computational methods use the term swarm intelligence to name collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or provision of a global model. … the intelligence of the swarm is based fundamentally on communication. … the member of the multitude do not have to become the same or renounce their creativity in order to communicate and cooperate with each other. They remain different in terms of race, sex, sexuality and so forth. We need to understand, then, is the collective intelligence that can emerge from the communication and cooperation of such varied multiplicity."