Ramez Naam Quotes

We believe the singularity is inevitable, and all businesses will be redefined as computers overtake humans in intelligence.

If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI.

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

Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have.

The idea [of the Quantum Computer] is to create a machine that is as intelligence as humans, and probably much more so.

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.

When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent - as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic.

I love stories like 'The Terminator' movies and 'The Matrix,' where our machines become self-aware and turn on us.

It struck me deep in my mind. Some day, the chip is going to surpass mankind's brain.

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.

A calculator is a tool for humans to do math more quickly and accurately than they could ever do by hand; similarly, AI computers are tools for us to perform tasks too difficult or expensive for us to do on our own, such as analyzing large data sets or keeping up to date on medical research.

To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations.

We will not only use the machines for their intelligence, we will also collaborate with them in ways that we cannot even imagine.

The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals and have its own will and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game.

IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.

My principal professional objective is to introduce intelligence as the ubiquitous utility. I'd like to be the Thomas Edison of intelligence.

Our computers double in capability on time scales of only a few years. It's hardly outrageous to believe that we will successfully develop thinking machines within a handful of decades, or at most a century or two. If that happens, these artificial sentients will quickly leave us behind.

At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.

AI does not keep me up at night. Almost no one is working on conscious machines. Deep learning algorithms, or Google search, or Facebook personalization, or Siri or self driving cars or Watson, those have the same relationship to conscious machines as a toaster does to a chess-playing computer.

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

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.

And we should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to concepts on the fringe of science fiction. Flaky American futurologists aren't always wrong. They remind us that a superintelligent machine is the last instrument that humans may ever design - the machine will itself take over in making further steps.

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

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

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.