Albert A. Bartlett? William Dillinger? Paul A. Tipler? David Suzuki? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: What do the following have in common: computing power, internet communication traffic, human population, energy use? Each has experienced exponential growth. The full implications of such rapid changes are difficult to grasp. A scientist has asserted that the incomprehension of exponential …
Search results for: technology
Machines Will Be Capable, Within Twenty Years, of Doing Any Work That a Man Can Do
Herbert A. Simon? Hubert L. Dreyfus? Raymond Kurzweil? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved several remarkable triumphs in recent years. For example, in 2017 the number one ranked Go player in the world was beaten by a computer program called AlphaGo. Yet, the progress of AI has been much …
Sometimes I Think We’re Alone, and Sometimes I Think We’re Not. In Either Case, the Idea Is Quite Staggering
Arthur C. Clarke? Stanley Kubrick? Christiane Kubrick? Jeremy Bernstein? Porky Pine? Walt Kelly? Frank Interlandi? Carl Sagan? Jerome Agel? Buckminster Fuller? David Shepley? Lee Alvin DuBridge? Anonymous? Quote Investigator: Astronomers have been searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence for more than a century. Is humankind alone in the universe, or is humankind sharing the cosmos …
I Don’t Work on Preventing AI from Turning Evil for the Same Reason That I Don’t Work on the Problem of Overpopulation on the Planet Mars
Andrew Ng? Nick Bostrom? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: A top artificial intelligence (AI) researcher was asked whether he feared the possibility of malevolent superintelligent robots wreaking havoc in the near future, and he answered “No”. He illustrated his answer with the following analogy. Worrying about human overpopulation on Mars is fruitless. It is a distant and …
The Problem With Television Is That the People Must Sit and Keep Their Eyes Glued on a Screen; the Average American Family Hasn’t Time for It
The New York Times? Orrin E. Dunlap Jr.? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: Wildly inaccurate predictions are always amusing. Apparently, an article in “The New York Times” contended that television broadcasting would never surpass radio broadcasting because people would never be willing to sit and stare at a screen for hours on end. Would you please …
The Brain Is Merely a Meat Machine
Marvin Minsky? Joseph Weizenbaum? Pamela McCorduck? Edward Fredkin? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: Within computer science the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI) is focused on analyzing and constructing entities that display advanced cognitive behaviors. These entities are designed to learn, solve problems, and achieve goals. Critics of the field contend that machines cannot embody genuine intelligence …
I Predict the Internet Will Soon Go Spectacularly Supernova and in 1996 Catastrophically Collapse
Robert Metcalfe? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: I recently read a collection of quotations highlighting wildly inaccurate technology predictions. One faulty forecast was made by Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet. He contended that the internet was going to collapse in the 1990s. Would you please help me to find a citation? Quote Investigator: On December 4, …
People Soon Get Tired of Staring at a Plywood Box Every Night
Darryl F. Zanuck? Anonymous Movie Mogul? Gabe Essoe? San Franciscan? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: Movie industry people felt threatened by the advent of televised entertainment. Yet, early television consoles were expensive devices housed in bulky wooden cabinets with small screens that displayed only flickering black and white images. Apparently, a skeptical movie tycoon said: People …
Continue reading “People Soon Get Tired of Staring at a Plywood Box Every Night”
(The Task of My Generation) Consists in Preventing the World from Destroying Itself
Albert Camus? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: Nuclear and biological warfare present ongoing existential risks for mankind. Environmental degradation presents another set of risks. The crucial task for this generation is to prevent the world from destroying itself. Apparently, the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus highlighted this task of self-preservation back in the 1950s. Would you …
It Is Easy To Predict an Automobile in 1880; It Is Very Hard To Predict a Traffic Problem
Frederik Pohl? Robert Heinlein? Isaac Asimov? Connie Willis? Ed Bryant? George Zebrowski? Ben Bova? Robert J. Sawyer? Sam Moskowitz? Dear Quote Investigator: Predicting the primary effects of a new technology is difficult but feasible. Anticipating all the secondary effects is nearly impossible. Here are two statements of a viewpoint that has achieved popularity amongst science …