Google or other search engines are examples of AI, and relatively simple AI, but they're still AI. That plus an awful lot of hardware to make it work fast enough.

The singularity has nothing to do with consciousness.

When I read philosophy or neuroscience papers about consciousness, I don't get the sense we're any closer to understanding it than we were 50 years ago.

Its really important to understand the difference between sentience and consciousness, which are important for human beings.

I used to say that if you gave me a trillion dollars to build a sentient or conscious machine I would give it back. I could not honestly say I knew how it works.

No one has a clue how to build a conscious machine, at all. We have less clue about how to do that than we have about build a faster-than-light spaceship.

Everything we have of value as human beings - as a civilization - is the result of our intelligence.

It's unlikely that machines would spontaneously decide they didn't like people, or that they had goals in opposition to those of human beings.

I expect that people are going to feel differently about that once they're aware that AI systems can watch through a camera and can, in some sense, understand what it's seeing.

Some PhD physicists write software or work for hedge funds, but physics still has a problem with having very smart people but not enough opportunities.

It's very hard to predict what kind of uses we'd make of assistants that could read and understand all the information the human race has ever generated. It could be really transformational.

Wisdom is better than an inheritance

Even if it's being a Beatle for the rest of my life, it's still only a temporary thing.

A truth looks freshest in the fashions of the day.

There were five writers on Blazing Saddles.

Resort to force in the Great War (I) failed to bring tranquillity. Victory and defeat alike were sterile. That lesson the world should have learned.

I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.

Too many people, because they were white and poor, black and rich, or just plain busy with something other than politics, have felt they had no voice in our government.

I love a friendship that flatters itself in the sharpness and vigor of its communications.

As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.