#artificial

No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial. ↗

— Agnes Smedley

#conceived #far #how #how far #knows

Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem! ↗

— Steven Pinker

#artificial-intelligence #ethics #malevolence #robots #attitude

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith. ↗

— Peter Watts

#comprehension #data-analysis #post-modern-technofaith #wisdom #faith

When it’s not enough to veto your children’s tendencies, you must in vitro them. ↗

— Bauvard

#children #funny #humor #parenting #funny

I think they are a better race than humans ever were. ↗

— Angelo Tsanatelis

#cyberpunk #cyborg #genetic-engineering #science-fiction #intelligence

Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. Tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft. ↗

— Charles Yu

#software #intelligence

Any computer that developed real consciousness was immediately identified by the Genesis subroutine and destroyed. It had been that way since the WikiWars a century ago, when Wikipedia became self-aware and began vengefully reediting its contributors with remote-controlled heavy weaponry. ↗

— Michael Rubens

#the-genesis-subroutine #the-wikiwars #wikipedia #intelligence

I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future. Turing believes machines think Turing lies with men Therefore machines do not think Yours in distress, Alan ↗

— Alan M. Turing

#homophobia #homosexuality #intelligence

The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears? Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation! I guess that explains their rich military history, then. -Ennesbey & Petey ↗

— Howard Tayler

#contradictions #cuddly #humour #military #overreaction

Everytime you think of your father, you resurrect him. Why shouldn't he continue a posthuman life in this world while he's resting in the other? ↗

— Clyde Dsouza

#augmented-reality #mind-uploading #posthuman #science #singularity