Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas ...

Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.

Minds are simply what brains do.

I bet the human brain is a kludge

Logic doesn't apply to the real world.

The brain happens to be a meat machine.

Eventually, robots will make everything.

Within 10 years computers won't even keep us as pets.

One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.

In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.

In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.

Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus.

Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

We turn to quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things.

In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.

If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.

You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.

An ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.

Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.

We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.

There are three basic approaches to AI: Case-based, rule-based, and connectionist reasoning.

Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.

Around 1967 Dan Bobrow wrote a program to do algebra problems based on symbols rather than numbers.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.

How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.

I think Lenat is headed in the right direction, but someone needs to include a knowledge base about learning.

No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either.

Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it is works but what it does when it's stuck.

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints - limitations on space, time, and materials.

Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.

I started working at a point in history when digital computers were becoming mature, and before that, there were no such machines.

It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.

I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

Some people believe that you should die, and some people think dying is a nuisance. I'm one of the latter. So I think we should get rid of death.

Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.

With the appearance of communications networks and interconnected computers, we got the world wide web, and it changed the lives of most people, I think.

There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI; for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.

We all admire great accomplishments in the sciences, arts, and humanities - but we rarely acknowledge how much we achieve in the course of our everyday lives.

The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. ...it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.

Sometimes a problem will seem completely insurmountable. Then someone comes up with a simple new idea, or just a rearrangement of old ideas, that completely eliminates it.

What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.

I believed in realism, as summarized by John McCarthy's comment to the effect that if we worked really hard, we'd have an intelligent system in from four to four hundred years.

Experience has shown that science frequently develops most fruitfully once we learn to examine the things that seem the simplest, instead of those that seem the most mysterious.

Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions.

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