Seth Shostak Quotes

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.

Sure, our three-pound brains might be inadequate to understand the universe. But perhaps they're just good enough to build something that can.

Confined to the use of his own physical power, man is one of the most helpless animals. In proportion to his size and requirements, he is unquestionably very weak and slow. But the superiority of his organism consists precisely in the aptitude of his brain and the fitness of his hands for the contrivance and use of mechanical devices, through which he may take from nature, by artifice, those forces in which he is naturally wanting

Is the human race a universal constructor?

From the growth of the Internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore.

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

I want to see what technology's going to be like in a few hundred years, if the human race hasn't completely obliterated itself by then.

The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.

I think we built the right future. If it's a choice between the flying car or the Internet, tablets and smartphones, I'll take what we've got.

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.

Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence - in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement - wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.

When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence.

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated.

We're the first technology-creating species. We use technology to extend our reach. We didn't stay in the caves, and we haven't stayed on the planet. To play jazz with our genomes and the universe might ultimately be what we're all about.

The promise of artificial intelligence and computer science generally vastly outweighs the impact it could have on some jobs in the same way that, while the invention of the airplane negatively affected the railroad industry, it opened a much wider door to human progress.

In general, when it comes to AI, many of us subconsciously cling to the selfish notion that humanity is the endpoint of evolution.

I think that technology is the best thing that ever happened to mankind. It's an absurd notion that somehow, 'My God, what are we going to do when driverless cars come along?' It's going to save lives on the road. And maybe, one day, we'll all be working four days a week and not five or six days a week.

There will come a time when the human race and super intelligence will coexist to create a richer and happier life.

In some ways, technology keeps on enhancing us, and we embrace it.

We have this yearning to know the answers to the big questions about space and why we're here; we can't evolve fast enough to figure these answers out on our own, but we can do it through artificial intelligence. But there's also some very scary downsides that could come if we don't put the right safety precautions in there.

We can't stop the development of smarter and smarter artificial intelligences. So our alternative is to make ourselves smarter so that we always stay one step ahead.

We've been merging with tools since the beginning of human evolution, and arguably, that's one of the things that makes us human beings.

Thank God for machines. They can make a dog sing!