Quote

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?'

Our computers double in capability on time scales of only a few years. It's hardly outrageous to believe that we will successfully develop thinking machines within a handful of decades, or at most a century or two. If that happens, these artificial sentients will quickly leave us behind.

For the moment, machines able to 'think' in anything approaching a human sense remain science-fiction. How we should prepare for their potential emergence, however, is a deeply unsettling question - not least because intelligent machines seem considerably more achievable than any consensus around their programming or consequences.

Ultimately, I hypothesize that technology will one day be able to recreate a realistic representation of us as a result of the plethora of content we're creating converging with other advances in machine learning, robotics and large-scale data mining.

If we're going to achieve compassion in the machines and also feel safe with the machines, to raise machines with human-like values, we need to make them human-like by simulating, or perhaps eventually imitating, human beings in high accuracy from top to bottom.

The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.

Because of the increased efficiency of machines, it is getting harder and harder for a human to make a productive contribution to society.

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

These machines are going to reflect our species and our evolutionary process. Everything we are will end up in these artificially intelligent machines no matter what we do.

If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.