Cognitive Enhancement Quotes

The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that if you can improve intelligence even a little, the process accelerates. It's a tipping point. Like trying to balance a pen on one end - as soon as it tilts even a little, it quickly falls the rest of the way.

You can't fix stupid. There's not a pill you can take, or a class you can go to.

Our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted.

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.

The difference between a chimpanzee and a human brain is that the brain of a chimpanzee is largely unfurnished. Whereas we fill our brains with memes. We download hundreds of thousands of memes, and that's where we get our power from. Your computer or your phone isn't a very powerful device until you download some apps to it. Those are like memes.

The internet tends to make smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.

The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug.

The Internet of things will augment your brain.

Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.

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

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.

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 think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy... If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer's disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people.

Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

My philosophy is my learning process. Until you die, you must evolve and improve.

As you go out to the 2040s, now the bulk of our thinking is out in the cloud. The biological portion of our brain didn't go away but the nonbiological portion will be much more powerful. And it will be uploaded automatically the way we back up everything now that's digital.

"You were designed to be very smart, Max," she told me. "We electrically stimulated your synaptic nerve endings while your brain was developing." "And yet I still can't program my DVD player," I said.

The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power - the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments-what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power.

Read. It makes you more intelligent. It’s that simple. We all see the universe through the tiny keyhole of our own eyes, and every book is another keyhole from which you can gaze.

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.

As computer intelligence gets better, what will be possible when we interface our brains with computers? It might sound scary, but early evidence suggests otherwise: interfacing brains with machines can be helpful in treating traumatic brain injury, repairing spinal cord damage, and countless other applications.

For some reason, chewing gum for me gets my brain going.

The U.S. has spent billions of dollars on educating and supporting teachers or developing curricula but no resources are applied to 'improving the brain' that a student brings to the classroom.