Conscious Machines Quotes

Since the beginning of the computer age, there has been immense development in computer intelligence but exactly zero development in computer consciousness.

AI does not keep me up at night. Almost no one is working on conscious machines. Deep learning algorithms, or Google search, or Facebook personalization, or Siri or self driving cars or Watson, those have the same relationship to conscious machines as a toaster does to a chess-playing computer.

If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.

Scientists who have dedicated their lives to building machines that think, feel that it's only a matter of time before some form of consciousness is captured in the laboratory.

Although I'm not prepared to move up my prediction of a computer passing the Turing test by 2029, the progress that has been achieved in systems like Watson should give anyone substantial confidence that the advent of Turing-level AI is close at hand. If one were to create a version of Watson that was optimized for the Turing test, it would probably come pretty close.

The fact that natural selection and evolution crafted essentially carbon and water into a mechanism that can think and be conscious means there's nothing in physics that says you cannot do that to a greater degree.

We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.

It's only a matter of time before machinery becomes sentient. It's going to happen because we're already slaves to all of it.

By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond. Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution.

Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

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

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.

If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.

Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of their own.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.