Charles Stross Quotes

The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.

I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.

It's hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they're always smarter than you think.

A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

Is artificial intelligence less than our intelligence?

Google seems to be more intelligent than some people.

Once you acknowledge that human brains are basically made of atoms and acknowledge that atoms are governed by simple laws of physics, then there is no reasoning principle why computers couldn't do anything that people are doing, and we don't really see any evidence that this is not the case.

Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

Machines are on track to be on par with human intelligence in less than 15 years.

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.

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.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

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.

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are?

We could construct a machine that is more intelligent than we can understand. It's possible Google is that kind of thing already. It scales so fast.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.

The computer is a moron.

The idea [of the Quantum Computer] is to create a machine that is as intelligence as humans, and probably much more so.