Seth Shostak Quotes

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.

Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.

Is artificial intelligence less than our intelligence?

The big question society will have to answer is whether it wants computers thinking like humans.

This is a magical time for computer programming. We are moving towards the artifical intelligence holy grail of programming the computer to simulate the human brain.

If you ask people whether a computer can be smarter than a human, 99.9 percent will say that's science fiction. Actually, it's inevitable. It's guaranteed to happen.

I think what's really amazing is that given the scale of the web and getting the compute power we have today, we're starting to see things that appear intelligent but actually aren't semantically intelligent.

The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation.

Artificial intelligence is always 20 years away.

By definition, the Singularity means that machines would be smarter than us, and, in their wisdom, they can innovate new technologies. The innovations would come so quickly, and increasingly quickly, that the innovation would make Moore's Law seem as antiquated as Hammurabi's Code.

In order to be truly intelligent, computers must understand - that is probably the critical word.

We humans are not the end of evolution, so if we can make a machine that's as smart as a person, we can probably also make one that's much smarter. There's no point in making just another person. You want to make one that can do things we can't.

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.

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

In the entire history of the human species, every tool we've invented has been to expand muscle power. All except one. The integrated circuit, the computer. That lets us use our brain power.

My background really comes from geekdom and the idea of building a smart machine. If we're going to build a smart machine, let's have it read good books.

We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.

I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.

My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.

The computer is a moron.

I'd rather see artificial intelligence than no intelligence.

Robots have already surpassed human beings in calculation and memory, but I have no doubt that the time will come when they will surpass in wisdom as well.

If we can make computers more intelligent - and I want to be careful of AI hype - and understand the world and the environment better, it can make life so much better for many of us. Just as the Industrial Revolution freed up a lot of humanity from physical drudgery I think AI has the potential to free up humanity from a lot of the mental drudgery.

Look, when AIs come up, they're not going to be like us. A self-aware, sentient AI is not going to be like a human.