Ted Bell Quotes

The capacity of computers is doubling every eight months. It's exponential development. I think it's a real threat, actually, that a computer one day will be more intelligent than us.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

Our technology has already outstripped our ability to control it.

It's perfectly reasonable to say that AIs are potentially dangerous. That seems to me like a statement of fact.

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

Most of the intelligence out there must be artificial intelligence. We keep looking for critters like us living on a planet like ours, where in fact the majority of the intelligence out there is not biological. That would be my argument.

Machines built by human beings they will function correctly if we provide them with a very specific environment. But if that environment is changed, they won't function at all.

Unlike us, machines do not have a 'nature' consistent across vast reaches of time. They are, at least to begin with, whatever we set in motion - with an inbuilt tendency towards the exponential.

If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.

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

I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised rather than mechanised.

So if you're a robot and you're living on this planet, you can do things that you can't do in real life - things that you wished you could do: like fly; like have a car that flies; like have furniture that is alive.

A lot of jobs today are being automated; what happens when you extend that concept to very important areas of society like law enforcement? What happens if you start controlling the behavior of criminals or people in general with software-running machines? Those questions, they look like they're sci-fi but they're not.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.

I've always been interested in technology, but specifically how we can use machines to engage the imagination. I started using computers when I was young and was fascinated by creating rules and instructions that allow a computer to engage in a dialogue with humans. The stories found in the data all around us can do just that.

No operational commander should have to assign a soldier a task that could be done as well by a computer, a remote sensor, or an unmanned airplane.

When you apply computer science and machine learning to areas that haven't had any innovation in 50 years, you can make rapid advances that seem really incredible.

It's not telepathy. It's not the Borg. But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.

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.

Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

My own suspicion is that a stand-alone artificial mind will be more a tool of narrow utility than something especially apocalyptic.

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 just write mechanical things.