“I don’t think people were an important feature of [Alan Turing’s] life. I don’t know. There must have been some people that mattered a lot to him, certainly. But machines and ideas were his real love, I believe.”
— Dr. Shaun Wylie, The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing (1992)
“The Fermi Paradox is an observation by the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, who created the first controlled atomic chain reaction under the auspices of the Manhattan Project, that if technological civilizations have even a slight probability of evolving, their presence should be visible throughout the universe. [T]he sky should be filled with the cosmic equivalent of roaring traffic and flashing neon signs. But instead we perceive a great silence.”
— Hans P. Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
“What Turing’s arguments suggest is that the things that it should be possible to compute with neurons in a brain are exactly the same things that it should be possible to compute with, say, transistors inside a computer. That’s kind of a scary thought because it suggests that you and I are machines somehow. Or at least what we’re able to ever think is somehow the same set of things that a computer could think. And a lot of people find that a very threatening thought because it suggests that somehow maybe they’re not so worthwhile. If they’re “just a computer”. We’re used to computers, computers are dumb machines, we know that they’re not valuable in the sense that people are valuable. So somehow people find it very insulting, the notion that they are a machine. And yet Turing’s argument is that what you can compute doesn’t matter what you’re built out of. That’s the essence of it. And so it doesn’t really matter that we’re built of biological components. What we can compute is the same as what a transistor computer can compute.”
— Dr. Daniel Hillis, The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing (1992)
“Yet in all directions, the universe looks like a barren wasteland of dead matter mindlessly acting out a cosmic screenplay written by nature’s laws. This panoply can be beautiful, for sure, but it lacks any convincing signs that intelligent life is crying out for companionship in a universe bereft of intrinsic meaning. There are no ripples of leaked radiation splashing against the shores of Earth. The sky is quiet—not a whisper, much less a shriek. The conundrum is that this is exactly opposite of what we would expect, given what we know about the natural world. The universe should be teeming with life, according to some estimates using the Drake Equation; we should be able to point our telescopes at the midnight firmament and see, at least on occasion, a spaceship flying by.”
— Phil Torres, The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse
“I feel a sort of spiritual connection with computer science, because it has so transformed my world view. Life, the universe, and everything make more sense in light of it. Probably every discipline thinks it has found the key to explaining reality, but I do feel that computer science touches on something fundamental about the universe.”
— Brian Tomasik, Why Your Laptop May Be Marginally Sentient
“Aging and death may be the species’ way of eliminating those who are no longer genetically useful but still competing for limited resources with those whose job it now is to pass along the genes.”
— Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time
“An organism is an integrated collection of problem-solving devices – adaptations – that were shaped by natural selection over evolutionary time, to promote, in some specific way, the survival of the genes that directed their construction.”
— Donald Symons
“We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.”
— Alex Comfort
“[H]ere’s my personal favorite, as popularized by the philosopher Adam Elga: can you blackmail an AI by saying to it, “look, either you do as I say, or else I’m going to run a thousand copies of your code, and subject all of them to horrible tortures—and you should consider it overwhelmingly likely that you’ll be one of the copies”? (Of course, the AI will respond to such a threat however its code dictates it will. But that tautological answer doesn’t address the question: how should the AI respond?)”
— Scott Aaronson, Can Computers Become Conscious?
“Pinning consciousness on “the brain’s biological causal powers” is just a restatement of the problem, like pinning why a sleeping pill works on its sedative virtue.”
— Scott Aaronson, Can Computers Become Conscious?
“Effective Altruists, then, know the price of everything and the value of nothing. In the words of C. S. Lewis’s criticism of anti-monarchists, they are people who view stones in a line as better than those in an arch. Heir apparent to Bentham’s reductive credo, they aspire to prize apart the rib cage of eudaimonia to feast on its entrails of utility.
When I see them casually dismiss poetry, the opera, the Iliad, the School of Athens, as outrageous luxuries instead of funging them into varying increments of common utility, to be sacrificed if expedient to satisfy items lower on Maslow’s hierarchy, I feel like the character in Plato’s famous cave metaphor, returning to the prisoners still shackled in the wall, obsessed with the procession of the shadows. The human condition demands more of us all than to chase these simulacra of a moral life.”
— Gregory Lewis parodying critiques of effective altruism
“This dynamic is completely counterintuitive without a deep understanding of the radical apocalyptic framework. In the case of apocalyptic terrorism, any attack on individuals or their group, including arrests, torture or mockery, only deepens their original convictions. In the case of true adherents of radical apocalypticism, such actions will never serve as a deterrent. This realization might well frustrate our country, policy makers and intelligence analysts to no end. Yet aggressive military action and anger that violently stems terrorism in the short-run often feeds the terrorist cycle in the long-run.”
— Frances Flannery, Understanding Apocalyptic Terrorism
“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
— Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“I am not an original man: and I think less of my own thoughts every day.”
— Henry Sidgwick
“Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.”
— Edsger W. Djikstra
“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”
— Donald Knuth
“If reconstructive uploading will eventually be possible, how can one ensure that it happens? There have been billions of humans in the history of the planet. It is not clear that our successors will want to reconstruct every person who ever lived, or even every person of whom there are records. So if one is interested in immortality, how can one maximize the chances of reconstruction? One might try keeping a bank account with compound interest to pay them for doing so, but it is hard to know whether our financial system will be relevant in the future, especially after an intelligence explosion.
My own strategy is to write about a future of artificial intelligence and about uploading. Perhaps this will encourage our successors to reconstruct me, if only to prove me wrong.”
— David Chalmers, Uploading: A Philosophical Analysis (in Russell Blackford’s & Damien Broderick’s “Intelligence Unbound: the Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds”, 2014, p. 116)
“We have pinned down some of the general properties of the universe just as early navigators pinned down the general configuration of the continents and the size of the Earth. But that was not the end of exploration of the Earth. Likewise, we are at the beginning, rather than at the end of our exploration of the universe.”
— Sir Martin Rees, What We Still Don’t Know (Channel 4 series, 2004)
Miscellaneous:
“Tā nemaz pasaulē neiet, kā domā. Pavisam citādi. No tālienes viss izskatās diez kā, un, kad pieiet klāt, – pavisam citādi.”
— Anna Brigadere, Sprīdītis
“We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
— Richard Dawkins, We Are Going To Die: Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
“Krietna cilvēka griba ir virzīta uz patiesi labu mērķi, bet nekrietna – uz tādu, kāds pagadās.”
— Aristotelis
“If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
“In our skulls, we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn’t think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
“To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or a river in one important respect: it is inclined to hit back. This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too will stop at nothing to preserve them. Natural selection favours genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species.”
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976), p. 67
“Cloning technologies even offer a possible solution for world hunger: creating meat and other protein sources in a factory without animals by cloning animal muscle tissue. Benefits would include extremely low cost, avoidance of pesticides and hormones that occur in natural meat, greatly reduced environmental impact (compared to factory farming), improved nutritional profile, and no animal suffering. As with therapeutic cloning, we would not be creating the entire animal but rather directly producing the desired animal parts or flesh. Essentially, all of the meat – billions of pounds of it – would be derived from a single animal.
There are other benefits to this process besides ending hunger. By creating meat in this way, it becomes subject to the law of accelerating – exponential improvements in price-performance of information-based technologies over time – and will thus become extremely inexpensive. Even though hunger in the world today is certainly exacerbated by political issues and conflicts, meat could become so inexpensive that it would have a profound effect on the affordability of food.
The advent of animal-less meat will also eliminate animal suffering. The economics of factory farming place a very low priority on the comfort of animals, which are treated as cogs in a machine. The meat produced in this manner, although normal in all other respects, would not be part of an animal with a nervous system, which is generally regarded as a necessary element for suffering to occur, at least in a biological animal. We could use the same approach to produce such animal by-products as leather and fur. Other major advantages would be to eliminate the enormous ecological and environmental damage created by factory farming as well as the risk of prion-based diseases, such as mad-cow disease and its human counterpart, vCJD.”
— Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 224
“Cryonics is an experiment. So far the control group isn’t doing very well.”
— Dr. Ralph Merkle
“Why shouldn’t I eat toothpaste? It’s a free world. Why shouldn’t I chew my toenails? i happen to have trodden in some honey. Why shouldn’t I prance across central park with delicate sideways leaps? I know what your answer will be: “it isn’t done”. But it’s no earthly use just saying it isn’t done. If there’s a reason why it isn’t done, give the reason – if there’s no reason, don’t attempt to stop me doing it. All other things being equal, the mere fact that something “isn’t done” is in itself an excellent reason for doing it.”
— Derek Parfit, The Eaton College Chronicle (Eton Microcosm, 1964, p. 101)
“Medical expertise, not being a natural resource, does not fall under Nozick’s “Lockean proviso”. The following trialogue is then a realistic scenario within Nozick’s libertarian society. A police officer comes upon a couple struggling with each other, the man evidently trying to rape the woman.
Woman: Please, sir, please help me.
Officer (to man): Hey, you, let her go at once!
Man: Don’t get involved.
Officer: I must. You are violating this woman’s right not to be assaulted.
Man: No, I’m not. She is my slave. Here are the papers, signed by herself.
Woman: But I was coerced into signing. He said he would not treat my father if I refused to sign.
Officer: That’s not coercion but at most duress. He was at liberty not to treat your father or to ask compensation for treating him.
Woman: But my father is dead!
Man: The contract says only that I would try to save him, and I did.
Officer (to woman): I’m sorry, ma’am, but I cannot help you.
Man: But you can help me in forcing her to fulfill her contractual obligations. She has already scratched me. See if you can tie her hands.
(Officer ties Woman’s hands, she screams for help as she is being raped…)
Man (to Officer): I’m glad the police are protecting citizen’s rights. Isn’t she great? My sons will have lots of fun with her when I bring her home.”
— Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (1989)
“If we are to be morally and ethically responsible, there can be no turning back once we find, as we have found, that some of the most basic presuppositions of these values are mistaken. Playing God is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries. We play with fire and take the consequences, because the alternative is cowardice in the face of the unknown.”
— Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (2000), p. 446
“[C]omputation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal.”
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, chapter “Natural Computation”
“You are objecting we humans feel something when we have a belief or a desire or a perception, and a mere inscription lacks the power to create such feelings.”
— Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, chapter “Natural Computation”
“Smallpox is “a judgment of God on the sins of the people,” and “to avert it is but to provoke him more”. Inoculation is “an croachment on the prerogatives of Jehovah, whose right it is to wound and smite.””
— unknown, said against Dr. Zabdiel Boylston (1721)
“At times, as I watch [bonobos], I seem to be staring into my own distant past and seeing in front of me “quasi persons” – not people, but “near people.” The feeling is as though, in an eerie and inexplicable way, I am watching a species that is not the same as me yet is connected to me – is part of me. Even after many years of watching and studying bonobos, I still cannot help but sense that I am in the presence of the emergence of the human mind, the dawn of our peculiarly human perspective and feeling.”
— Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Apes, Language, and the Human Mind
“When I contracted malaria, an infectious tropical disease caused by parasites found in the female anopheles mosquitoes, I probably had the virus in my system for about 3 weeks before I realized I was sick. I just felt extreme fatigue, headaches, a complete loss of appetite, and fever. It just felt like the flu.
I realized I had contracted the disease, when the infection was already quite advanced in my blood and I suffered from a sudden attack in the middle of the night. I awoke to what felt like lightning going through my legs, and then spreading through my body and in my head. Probably the worst headache, body aches, and chills you could possibly imagine. It felt like I was being stung repeatedly by an electric shock gun and could barely control my movements. The pain was so intense; I actually believed I was dying, literally crying out in pain so bad that I was taken to a 24 hour clinic that night at 3am.”
— Coumba Makalou, What it feels like to have Malaria (2007)
“Of course, remember that there’s no such thing as objective probability: The “real” probability is 1 for however the multiverse is and 0 for everything else. Probabilities are tools that we use to express our own ignorance, and it’s convenient to think of them as though they represent “actual randomness” over different outcomes (even though there is no such thing as “actual randomness”).”
— Brian Tomasik, Why Maximize Expected Value?
“When I learned more about the disease from the doctors working actively on the disease I realized that I was lucky to be alive. They had rarely seen someone keep such high levels parasites in their blood and not die. It was a rude awakening to the reality of Malaria—it’s dangerous, and it can kill anyone. I felt very grateful and happy to have survived Malaria and to be able to share my story with others.
I was sick for about 2 months. My entire treatment costs were more than $200 US. The average person in Mali makes less than $1 a day. One million children in Africa die from the disease each year, due to the extreme poverty levels and not being able to afford proper diagnosis and treatment. Every 30 seconds a child dies of Malaria in Africa.”
— Coumba Makalou, What it feels like to have Malaria (2007)
“For myself, I find it just intuitive that the magnitude of importance of something should scale linearly with its probability. From this standpoint, expected-value maximization needs no further justification; the expected value just is how much I think the possible outcome matters.”
— Brian Tomasik, Why Maximize Expected Value?
“It’s more useful to ask when aid works, not whether.”
— Andy Sumner, The $138.5 Billion Question: When Does Foreign Aid Work?
“[W]ith the gene itself steering evolution, the fact that the drone shared its DNA with the queen meant that its servitude guarantees not the individual’s survival, but the endurance of the genes they share. Or as the Anglo-Indian biologist JBS Haldane put it: “Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.””
— Adam Rutherford, The Selfish Gene turns 40 (The Guardian, May 29, 2016)
“I’ve read, and typed, and read again these numbers, and they are so stark to me that they can easily float away into the atmosphere of statistics, escaping true empathy. Understanding one nation’s experience feels more visceral: Every day, more than 500 people die from malaria in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the majority of these deaths are children under the age of five. AMF offers a shattering metaphor: Imagine a fully booked 747 airplane and infants strapped into seats A through K of every row of the economy section; their feet cannot reach the floor. Every day, this plane disappears into the Congo River, killing every soul on board. That is malaria – in one country. By GiveWell’s calculations it would cost $1.7 million to save the airplane.”
— Derek Thompson, The Greatest Good (The Atlantic, June 15, 2015)
”The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.”*
— Edsger Dijkstra
“Malaria is not merely the greatest killer of children in the world, but also it is the greatest killer of pregnant women. The disease plunders motherhood from both sides of the equation. The loss of a mother must be quantifiable by some measure of creative accounting, but in my experience it is immeasurable.”
— Robert Mather, quoted on The Greatest Good (The Atlantic, June 15, 2015)