Isaac Asimov Quotes

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

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.

We're fascinated with robots because they are reflections of ourselves.

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.

By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are?

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

When a machine can do something better and faster than a person can, I am happy to let the machine do it.

Confined to the use of his own physical power, man is one of the most helpless animals. In proportion to his size and requirements, he is unquestionably very weak and slow. But the superiority of his organism consists precisely in the aptitude of his brain and the fitness of his hands for the contrivance and use of mechanical devices, through which he may take from nature, by artifice, those forces in which he is naturally wanting

I think the 'Terminator' idea is a reasonable one - that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you're making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It's not that you don't like the ants, it's not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.

I truly believe that everything Sci-fi taught me as a child about an efficient and wondrous world will be happening in my lifetime.

The field of AI has traditionally been focused on computational intelligence, not on social or emotional intelligence. Yet being deficient in emotional intelligence (EQ) can be a great disadvantage in society.

Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.

Researchers here in New York created a robot that actually passed a self-awareness test. So if you're keeping score, that's robots: 1, Donald Trump, 0.

Technology has outstripped our knowledge of self.

Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of their own.

Man must be at once more humble and more confident; more humble in the face of destructive potentials of what he can achieve, more confident of his own humanity as against computers and robots which are only engines to simulate him.

Self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn't need it in order to be successful, or even smart.

I embrace technology and I just think that in 1984 when James Cameron wrote about the technology, everyone thought he was totally way out there and it was science fiction. Now it's almost reality what he talked about. The machines have taken over, except they have not become self-aware, like in Terminator. So this is really one thing that we have to watch out for, but I think technology is good.

Self-righteousness is unavoidable. You can either be a self-righteous Pharisee where you think you are better than everyone else or you can be a self-righteous pagan who thinks you are better than the Pharisee. If you are a self-righteous person, I could become very self-righteous thinking that you're self-righteous and you think you're so good but I know you're bad. I know I'm bad so that makes me better than you.

Be self aware, rather than a repetitious robot

There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work.

... you just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.

The best computer is a man, and it’s the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

When you think about what Homo sapiens are about, you almost feel that we are replacing ourselves. We won't be able to breathe and breed on this earth, so we replace ourselves with androids that can do. The androids can go up into space and take the future of humanity forward because maybe we just bow out with a carbon-based epoch.