Terry Pratchett Quotes

Robots will someday, or maybe, wake up. They may be really smart. They may be as creative, smart and capable as human beings, and fully conscious, and self discerning with free will.

We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

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.

Our culture already has a number of well known stories about artificial life and non-human intelligence. In 'Exegesis,' I've tried to not only tell a new and engaging story but also to comment on those well known stories through the details of my novel.

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

I'm not a robot.

Post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things - even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hypercomputers to surpass the best 'special effects' in movies or computer games so vastly that they could simulate a world, fully, as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in.

It would help if human experts agreed on the meaning of such basic terms as intelligence, consciousness, or awareness. They don't. It's hard to build something that's incompletely defined.

I thought if I could create a convincing cat I could say and do anything I wanted on the human condition.

For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine.

People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.

I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence.

The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man.

Robots are not people. They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul.

I believe there is something going on in a conscious being, which includes many animals, as well as ourselves, that is not a computational activity. And to be conscious at all is not a quality that a computer as such will ever possess - no matter how complicated, no matter how well it plays chess or any of these things.

Look, when AIs come up, they're not going to be like us. A self-aware, sentient AI is not going to be like a human.

When you program a robot to be intelligent, you learn a number of things. You become very humble and develop enormous respect for natural intelligence because, even if you work day and night for several years, your robot isn't that smart after all.

Equipment has heart, human heart, inside it.

It's hard to say how far we are down the road to our conventional understanding of artificial intelligence, but I think what we've developed so far, if it's not already consciously awake and hiding from us because it's seen what an ugly and destructive race we are, and it's trying to preserve itself, it's probably in a state of dreaming.

I've always been skeptical of the idea that sentience is going to be an exclusively human attribute.

Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being.

At the end of the day, at 49 years old, it's realistic to believe that a Terminator has a heart.

There's a lot that machine learning can't do that humans can do very, very well.

I'm not a machine.