Quotes

"How does the intervention of a soul turn the ditchwater of physics into the glowing wine of qualia?"

~ PETER HANKINS

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying."

~ WOODY ALLEN

"As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."

~ NICHOLAS CARR

"The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter.... Google is really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

~ LARRY PAGE

"If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease."

~ SENT-TS' AN

"The initial organization of the brain does not rely that much on experience.... Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.... 'Built-in' does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience."

~ GARY MARCUS

"In the US and in Britain, magnetism and gravity are understood better by children before they've been to school than afterwards."

~ JONATHAN DRORI

"Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out."

~ THOMAS CARDINAL WOLSEY

"The test of validity of a scientific theory is not whether it is perfect or whether it explains everything or whether it makes us feel happy or satisfies some deep emotional need, but whether it works better than any of its competitors. And there is nothing that comes even close to replacing the neo-Darwinian synthesis as the explanation of life's diversity."

~ MANO SINGHAM

"Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all."

~ HERBERT SPENCER

"Intelligence is making predictions about novel events."

~ JEFF HAWKINS

"The secret to productivity in so many fields is letting dead people do your work for you."

~ ROBERT LANG

"Just as we may eventually take the brain apart, neuron by neuron, and never find the model, we may discover that true AI came into existence without anyone ever developing a coherent model of reality or an unambiguous theory of intelligence. Reality, with all its ambiguities, does the job just fine. It may be that our true destiny as a species is to build an intelligence that proves highly successful, whether we understand how it works or not."

~ GEORGE DYSON

"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."

~ KURT VONNEGUT

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

~ KURT VONNEGUT