“I hang out with people who are worried about this, and it’s actually still hard to keep this concern in view. The moment you spend ten minutes not thinking about it, the moment it takes for you to start thinking about it makes you think that maybe it’s just crazy, all bullshit. I mean, what, is there really going to be a superintelligent machine that’s going to swallow the world? I mean, this is unlike other things – I mean other things have this character, like it’s hard to worry about climate change because it’s an abstraction. I mean, it’s hot out there today, but is it hotter than it used to be. In the cold war, I mean, we still have these ICBMs pointed in all of the wrong directions. We’re living under a constant threat of something going wrong and annihilating the better part of humanity and yet it’s easier to worry about Twitter than to worry about that. But this thing is so lampoonable and it’s – it’s just kind-of a goofy notion which seems too strange to be the substance of good credible fiction, and yet when you look at the assumptions you need to get on the train, there’s only two, and they’re very hard to doubt the truth of. We just have to keep making progress and there’s nothing magical about biological material in terms of an intelligent system.

And yet the only thing scarier than developing artificial intelligence is not developing it. Intelligence is our only asset, ultimately – it’s given us everything good. We want more of it. Progress in this area seems almost like an intrinsic good. Whatever you want, you want to be able to solve problems and anticipate the negative consequences of your doing good things and mitigate those, and intelligence is just the thing you use to do that.”

— Sam Harris