William Irwin Thompson Quotes

It's not going to do any good to land on Mars if we're stupid.

Human intelligence may not be the best trick nature has to offer.

We are the greatest computers in this world, but now we've created the smart phone which is smarter than us now, but we're still making dumb decisions. We have given our creations more power than we have, and that to me is dumb.

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.

We're dumber and less cognitively nimble if we're not around other people - and, now, other machines.

We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.

We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it.

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

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.

Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.

In a world that's smarter than it used to be and, in some ways, smarter than it ought to be, stupidity has a way of making us seem all the more human.

Is artificial intelligence less than our intelligence?

As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular - or supremely practical - replies.

Human intelligence trumps electronic or signals intelligence every time.

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

Intelligence is set by policy.

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.

When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent - as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic.

To make real progress in A.I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense.

A computational device is incapable of developing a mind. We got consciousness not just by being clever.

We're making progress, but getting machines to replicate our ability to perceive and manipulate the world remains incredibly hard.

We are approaching a time when human intelligence alone will be incapable of managing a highly advanced society. Existing technologies are rapidly exceeding the human capacity to absorb and process information.

Achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, identifying treatments to diseases like cancer, and harnessing the power of robotics and artificial intelligence to support everyday tasks are all within our grasp. The first country that gives birth to these discoveries will change life as we know it.

We should never forget that in the smartphone, the smart part is us creators.

We will not only use the machines for their intelligence, we will also collaborate with them in ways that we cannot even imagine.