Stephen Hawking Quotes

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence - in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement - wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.

The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.

For more than twenty-five years my mind had been deeply troubled by the fact that these mechanical and scientific achievements ofman had outrun his intellectual and spiritual power. ...Throughout the Second World War this terrible problem hung in the back of my mind. As I write these words the problem and the danger are as threatening as ever. We hope our nation will survive, but in its effort to survive will it transform itself intellectually and spiritually into the image of the thing against which we fought?

I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.

Is the human race a universal constructor?

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

I want to see what technology's going to be like in a few hundred years, if the human race hasn't completely obliterated itself by then.

The real world is far too complex and unpredictable to make something like the idea of humanity controlling its own evolution or engineering itself - well, I wouldn't say impossible but it should be approached with a degree of caution.

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.

If I could create a world where people lived forever, or at the very least a few billion years, I would do so. I don't think humanity will always be stuck in the awkward stage we now occupy, when we are smart enough to create enormous problems for ourselves, but not quite smart enough to solve them.

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

We're the first technology-creating species. We use technology to extend our reach. We didn't stay in the caves, and we haven't stayed on the planet. To play jazz with our genomes and the universe might ultimately be what we're all about.

Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.

You can graph human evolution, which is mostly a straight line, but we do get better and change over time, and you can graph technological evolution, which is a line that's going straight up. They are going to intersect each other at some point, and that's happening now.

We're going to merge with machines and become gods, but first, we've got to reduce the world population 90 percent.

If the computer-guided robots turn out to be our superiors in every respect, then will they not find that they can run the world better without the need of us at all? Humanity itself will then have become obsolete.

We are approaching a time when human intelligence alone will be incapable of managing a highly advanced society. Existing technologies are rapidly exceeding the human capacity to absorb and process information.

Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.

We can't stop the development of smarter and smarter artificial intelligences. So our alternative is to make ourselves smarter so that we always stay one step ahead.

Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.