Michael Dickinson Quotes

If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.

Don't expect to be able to upload your cat's brain into your Roomba any time soon.

A meticulous virtual copy of the human brain would enable basic research on brain cells and circuits or computer-based drug trials.

By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are?

Is artificial intelligence less than our intelligence?

I believe there is something going on in a conscious being, which includes many animals, as well as ourselves, that is not a computational activity. And to be conscious at all is not a quality that a computer as such will ever possess - no matter how complicated, no matter how well it plays chess or any of these things.

To make real progress in A.I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense.

We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.

My main interest is in trying to find radically different kinds of neural nets.

Once you acknowledge that human brains are basically made of atoms and acknowledge that atoms are governed by simple laws of physics, then there is no reasoning principle why computers couldn't do anything that people are doing, and we don't really see any evidence that this is not the case.

The human brain has an amazing ability for pattern recognition, sometimes even better than a computer.

It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.

I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.

Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

What's most interesting about trying to figure out AI is the questions that it forces you to ask about the nature of consciousness.

We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.

The arithmetical machine produces effects that approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals. But it does nothing that would enable us to attribute will to it, as to the animals.

Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn't have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.

Deep learning doesn't shine.

Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.