15 quotes
Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.
Unrestricted altruism is not so common that we can afford to fritter it away on a plethora of feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy.
Perhaps it is a sign of civilizational progress that the very idea of threatening a nuclear first strike today seems borderline silly or morally obscene.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.
The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
By anybody’s standards, there is a huge amount of unnecessary and undeserved suffering that is just bad and that we should get rid of.
The End of Suffering (2006)
Cryonics is the second worst thing that can happen to you.
Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board – contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
The universe is cold. Fun is the fire that melts the blocks of hardship and creates a bubbling celebration of life. It is the birth right of every creature, a right no less sacred for having been trampled on since the beginning of time.
Letter From Utopia (2008)
Observers in earlier epochs might have found it equally preposterous to suppose that the world economy would one day be doubling several times within a single lifespan. Yet that is the extraordinary condition we now take to be ordinary.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
The Internet is a big boon to academic research. Gone are the days spent in dusty library stacks digging for journal articles. Many articles are available free to the public in open-access journal or as preprints on the authors’ website.
Solving the value-loading problem is a research challenge worthy of some of the next generation’s best mathematical talent. We cannot postpone confronting this problem until the AI has developed enough reason to easily understand our intentions.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development—and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
In this situation, any feeling of gee-wiz exhilaration would be out of place. Consternation and fear would be closer to the mark; but the most appropriate attitude may be a bitter determination to be as competent as we can, much as if we were preparing for a difficult exam that will either realize our dreams or obliterate them.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)