Alastair Reynolds Quotes

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

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

Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have.

I couldn't think of anything more pointless than reading a piece of fiction written by a robot.

The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking.

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.

I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.

Men of great talents, whether poets or historians, seldom escape the attacks of those who, without ever favoring the world with any production of their own, take delight in criticising the works of others.

Though I would have liked my chances in a rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time.

In the area of robotics and in the area of connectivity, technology is offering us things that we are vulnerable to - and we have to have a better response than a shrug.

Today, chess programs have become so good that even grandmasters sometimes struggle to understand the logic behind some of their moves.

Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

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

It is at least worth arguing that there is a modicum of the creative novelist in all of us, and that this absorption with how men get out of difficulties, single-handedly and alone if possible, is the stuff of which we weave the warp and woof of our own better dramatic imaginings.

When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?

Deep learning doesn't shine.

We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.

I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines.

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.

Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.

It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.