Danny Hillis Quotes

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

... as the world rapidly becomes a civilization of machines, the masters of machines will increasingly be the ones in control of the world.

Now that we all live in a bad '70s sci-fi movie, I am made to understand the tyranny of the machines every minute of every day.

I'm more frightened than interested by artificial intelligence - in fact, perhaps fright and interest are not far away from one another. Things can become real in your mind, you can be tricked, and you believe things you wouldn't ordinarily. A world run by automatons doesn't seem completely unrealistic any more. It's a bit chilling.

If computers take over, it will serve us right.

Terminator' is a reflection of how the world is changing.

I was actually born a robot, so 'Westworld' is just autobiographical.

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.

Ultimately, our ideas about robots are not about robots. The robot is a canvas onto which we project our hopes and our dreams and our fears... they become embodiments of those hopes and dreams and fears.

Once computers can program, they basically take over technological progress because already, today, the majority of technological progress is run by software, by programming.

It's only a matter of time before machinery becomes sentient. It's going to happen because we're already slaves to all of it.

I'm not so worried about super-intelligence and 'Terminator' scenarios. Frankly I think those are quite farfetched.

A computer doesn't have a mind of its own - it needs someone else's to function.

The future of the world is in the palm of the tech community.

If technology can remove some of the labour-intensive tasks where the computer can do better than the human eye; that helps.

Automation is good, so long as you know exactly where to put the machine.

I am patiently waiting for the singularity.

'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.

Everything that humans can do a machine can do.

Robots are great. I am saying that now so that when a future civilization of robots takes us captive, they will search through the 'Guardian' web archive and realise I said, 'Robots are great,' and then they'll choose to save me.

A lot of people are scared that machines will take over the world, machines will turn evil: the Hollywood 'Terminator' scenario.

As we get robots becoming more sophisticated, I think we should worry sooner rather than later on how much they could take over, but I think it'll mostly be a positive thing. In terms of deadlines it won't be any worse than nuclear weapons.

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

Robotics and other combinations will make the world pretty fantastic compared with today.

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.