Neil Harbisson Quotes

I think there can be a positive sort of futurism even in a presentist society. But I think it's a kind of futurism that envisions augmenting human ability and intellect rather than creating some artificial machine intelligence that displaces us.

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 want the humans to be able to hold their own against the strength of the machines.

Inevitably the machines must win, but there is still a long way to go before a human on his or her best day is unable to defeat the best computer.

We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. 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.

I make short films, little documentaries, about the co-evolution of humans and technology.

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

People say, like, 'Are you a regular person?' 'Well, I'm not a robot, if that's what you're asking, I really am a person.'

Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.

You can make the assumption that most human drivers are not out to kill pedestrians. Well, maybe in some parts of Boston they are. But with a person at the wheel who you can see, you behave accordingly. With the robotic car, how do you know what assumption to make?

I see technology as being an extension of the human body.

Machines are what enable the human race to move forward and up, and machines have always been physical,. Computers are the first devices that actually help the mind.

As more intelligent computer assistance comes into being, it will amplify human progress.

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.

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

Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we'll augment our intelligence.

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

We cannot blindly pursue the goal of machine intelligence without pondering its consequences.

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

Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself. And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don't think that we will become the machines of the machines.

Although we will hate and fight the machines, we will be supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for the intelligent machines to which we will give birth may, better than we, carry on the striving toward the goal of understanding and using the Universe, climbing to heights we ourselves could never aspire to.

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

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.

With the increasingly important role of intelligent machines in all phases of our lives--military, medical, economic and financial, political--it is odd to keep reading articles with titles such as Whatever Happened to Artificial Intelligence? This is a phenomenon that Turing had predicted: that machine intelligence would become so pervasive, so comfortable, and so well integrated into our information-based economy that people would fail even to notice it.

The development of artificial intelligence may well imply that man will relinquish his intellectual supremacy in favor of thinking machines. With oceans of time available for future innovation, there seems to be no reason why machines cannot achieve and surpass anything of which the human brain is capable.