Clay Shirky Quotes

Big data is mostly about taking numbers and using those numbers to make predictions about the future. The bigger the data set you have, the more accurate the predictions about the future will be.

Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.

Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn't get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they're going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do that?

There's an evolution from, today we tell computers to do stuff for us, to where computers can actually do stuff for us. For example, if I go and pick up my kids, it would be good for my car to be aware that my kids have entered the car and change the music to something that's appropriate for them.

If computers remain far worse than us at image recognition, a certain over-confident combination of man and machine can elsewhere take inaccuracy to a whole new level.

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.

Forget artificial intelligence - in the brave new world of big data, it's artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.

Machine learning is the science of getting computers to learn without being explicitly programmed.

I am worried that algorithms are getting too prominent in the world. It started out that computer scientists were worried nobody was listening to us. Now I'm worried that too many people are listening.

'Debug' is '2001' from Hal's perspective.

You could use artificial intelligence to build a system around postcodes and income, which could lead to racial profiling.

I see Grand Challenge not as the end of the robotics adventure we're on: it's almost like the beginning.

The message behind 'Time Is Up' is that robots are starting to take over the world, and we should be aware of it because they're already walking among us.

I worry about Google's data ethics and about the idea of handing over the corpus of my life, but I can't deny that it is exceptional at making sense of my ever-growing photo library.

Are machines getting more and more powerful? Absolutely. It's been going on since 1940. We are making progress, and for many people, it will be a lifesaver.

Data science is the combination of analytics and the development of new algorithms.

AI is neither good nor evil. It's a tool. It's a technology for us to use.

I am part of the World Economic Forum Global Council on Robotics and AI, and we spend a fair amount of our time together as a group discussing ethics, best practices, and the like.

I'm excited about bringing robots into the market, about having the most effect in the world.

Machine learning is looking for patterns in data. If you start with racist data, you will end up with even more racist models. This is a real problem.

I like to say I've been working on big data for so long, it used to be small data when I started working on it.

We know now data is so powerful, and you can learn so much about yourself and creating product with data.

Everything that humans can do a machine can do.

AI is a tool. The choice about how it gets deployed is ours.