Richard Dawkins Quotes

Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.

Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe.

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.

History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.

I don't care how big and fast computers are, they're not as big and fast as the world.

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

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.

Technology changes all the time; human nature, hardly ever.

Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.

I make short films, little documentaries, about the co-evolution of humans and technology.

In the entire history of the human species, every tool we've invented has been to expand muscle power. All except one. The integrated circuit, the computer. That lets us use our brain power.

Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.

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.

Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But only in the last 200 thousand years has a species arisen that can fathom the laws of nature and build hardware able to signal its presence.

I see technology as being an extension of the human body.

My wish for humanity is to invent a way to communicate between us and whatever comes next. And in the end that we the creator of the sentient sapient and the created we have a symbiotic relationship.

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

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.

We cannot be Neanderthal in a high-tech world.

… the biography of mankind

We cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand, slow march of intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities.

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

With science, technology and globalization, man is changing the world faster than his evolution can keep up with the new dangers.

Through writing, Homo sapiens then became the first species to preserve learning, enabling knowledge to grow, ultimately at an exponential pace. Collective learning over time then became the source of technological improvement, a process that could move much faster than evolution.