Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

Programming is how we talk to the machines that are increasingly woven into our lives. If you aren't a programmer, you're like one of the unlettered people of the Middle Ages who were told what to think by the literate priesthood. We had a Renaissance when more people could read and write; we'll have another one when everyone programs.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I'll never be hands-on on anything except software.

Somebody writing a subroutine is unbelievable boring.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

I thank God for not making me a computer scientist.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

Even though I had the talent, programming just didn't feel right. I never considered it very seriously. Some people get gratification from bending a machine to their will. I didn't.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

When the tech geeks talk, I pay close attention.

The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

It seemed really amazing that you could write a few lines of code and have it learn to do interesting things.

I don't program or code or anything like that.

I feel like I've forcefully been thrust into the tech world, and I've enjoyed every minute of it.

Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.

Beyond helping other people build AI systems with Deeplearning.ai, I also hope to build some AI systems myself!

I did not grow up around computers, so technology was not a tool used every day in my household. I was drawn to computer science due to the creative nature of programming and the technology focus.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

Formula creation is magnitudes harder for computer algorithms than actually executing within a formula. But once the genre is created and the formula is known, then the computer can do the repetitive task of executing within the genre.

We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.