Martin Rees Quotes

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.

If you ask people whether a computer can be smarter than a human, 99.9 percent will say that's science fiction. Actually, it's inevitable. It's guaranteed to happen.

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.

We humans are not the end of evolution, so if we can make a machine that's as smart as a person, we can probably also make one that's much smarter. There's no point in making just another person. You want to make one that can do things we can't.

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

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

I've come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

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

As far as what is the line between human and machine? That's a great question.

Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.

The computer is a moron.

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.

I absolutely don't think a sentient artificial intelligence is going to wage war against the human species.

Artificial intelligence is always 20 years away.

The revolution in AI [artifical intelligence] has been profound. It surprised me, even though I was sitting right there.

By definition, the Singularity means that machines would be smarter than us, and, in their wisdom, they can innovate new technologies. The innovations would come so quickly, and increasingly quickly, that the innovation would make Moore's Law seem as antiquated as Hammurabi's Code.

I'd rather see artificial intelligence than no intelligence.

If we can make computers more intelligent - and I want to be careful of AI hype - and understand the world and the environment better, it can make life so much better for many of us. Just as the Industrial Revolution freed up a lot of humanity from physical drudgery I think AI has the potential to free up humanity from a lot of the mental drudgery.

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.

Even though chess isn't the toughest thing that computers will tackle for centuries, it stood as a handy symbol for human intelligence. No matter what human-like feat computers perform in the future, the Deep Blue match demands an indelible dot on all timelines of AI progress.

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

'Detroit' started based on a book called 'The Singularity is Near' by Ray Kurzweil, which is about this idea that one day there could be machines that are more intelligent than we are.

There's a great phrase, written in the '70s: 'The definition of today's AI is a machine that can make a perfect chess move while the room is on fire.' It really speaks to the limitations of AI. In the next wave of AI research, if we want to make more helpful and useful machines, we've got to bring back the contextual understanding.

I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines.