Stephen Hawking Quotes

By the time we get to the 2040s, we'll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that's singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter.

I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.

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.

Extending our lives, extending our creativity, opening up the mysteries of the brain. All those things that are really exciting - that's kind of the basis of 'Neon Future,' and that's why I interviewed Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey.

I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.

We can't stop the development of smarter and smarter artificial intelligences. So our alternative is to make ourselves smarter so that we always stay one step ahead.

The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.

The primary implication is that we're going to combine our intelligence with computers. We're going to make ourselves smarter. By the 2030s, they will literally go inside our bodies and inside our brains.

Everything good and bad about technology would be magnified by implanting it deep in brains. Is the risk of brain-hacking outweighed by the societal benefits of faster, deeper communication, and the ability to augment our own intelligence?

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

The real world is far too complex and unpredictable to make something like the idea of humanity controlling its own evolution or engineering itself - well, I wouldn't say impossible but it should be approached with a degree of caution.

Not too many people in cocktail parties are aware of Bioprinting and growing organs, or the coming technological singularity; I've seen very little philosophical speculation about how far we can go, how much we could achieve.

Transhumanism is the ethics and science of using things like biological and genetic engineering to transform our bodies and make us a more powerful species.

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.

Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We'll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We'll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We'll be able to modify life in the future.

Andy Clark refers to humans as 'natural-born cyborgs.' What he means is that we habitually extend and change our body-concept without even thinking twice about it.

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.

By the time I'm 75 and I have a new hip, and my eyes are laser cleaned of cataracts, I wont think I'm a bionic man. I think that's just how technology works. The posthuman future of humanity will not announce itself; it will just creep up on us.

Of course it is a very simple matter to identify genes which might modify intelligence or memory and start thinking about whether you want to enhance a human, and the next generation is going to have to deal with that issue. Should we be trying to enhance humans rather than trying to educate them and so on?

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

We're going to merge with machines and become gods, but first, we've got to reduce the world population 90 percent.

We are cyborgs already. If you learn to read, it causes permanent changes to the structure of your brain for your entire life.

We must address, individually and collectively, moral and ethical issues raised by cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which will enable significant life extension, designer babies, and memory extraction.

Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.

We begin to not be human, as we've known it, any longer. But to be just creative minds and action, whereas right now we're confused minds and actions, and our environment mirrors that back to us.