Sherry Turkle Quotes

I do not believe we will get to Ray Kurzweil's proposed "singularity" in which human minds meld with machines to produce, in effect, synthetic human evolution. Our basic problems with maintaining the electric grid argue against that fantasy.

Because I believe that humans are computers, I conjectured that computers, like people, can have left- and right-handed versions.

A computer can have so much more in its brain that a human can.

The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

The difference between us and a computer is that, the computer is blindingly stupid, but it is capable of being stupid many, many million times a second.

The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.

Unfortunately, computers are?stupid.Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

the mind is a neural computer

You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.

The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.

Almost every profession I look at where you require human labor or you require intelligence, I see computers being able to do better than us within the next 10 years. I'm talking about a mass replacement of humans with artificial intelligence and robots.

[I]nside every computer, there is a hidden man being bored.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over.

Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.

If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.

Technology is, in the broadest sense, mind or intelligence or purpose blending with nature.

One could imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.

The thing that I really like is psychology. I love the human mind. I love the choices you make based on your experiences and instincts and your development based on such experiences and so I guess that's why I love acting so much.

If you intend to study the mind, you must have systematic training; you must practice to bring the mind under your control.

People need to realize that their thoughts are more primary than their genes, because the environment, which is influenced by our thoughts, controls the genes.

The primary implication is that we're going to combine our intelligence with computers. We're going to make ourselves smarter. By the 2030s, they will literally go inside our bodies and inside our brains.

There is so much to the human mind we don't understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.

It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior.