Philosophy

We allow firefighters to risk their lives to save others, and we honour them for it. We didn't allow people to test vaccines that way.

The Red Crescent sheik said: 'That would just be giving his life back. We could do that.' A WHO official, told that the same Filipino patient would have died without our exchange, exclaimed, 'He should be dead!'

A repugnant transaction has fans as well as foes. When I call something repugnant, I'm not saying I oppose it, or that you should -- only that it has opponents who raise objections primarily on moral grounds.

We wouldn't like there to be any heroin in society, but there's plenty of heroin. So our discussion can't just concern our moral feelings about drug addiction. It has to involve our consequential feelings about prisons, overdose deaths, and the effect on communities. You can't escape consequences when you talk about the world.

Hope is active — it's a discipline. It would be such a profound disservice to give up: a disservice to young people, to the scientists who have spent decades working. There is no other option but to be hopeful. That is what activates me. There is simply no other option.

Nature is not the backdrop to our lives — it is our lives. We are nature and nature is us. There is no separation. We invented the ideology that we're exempt from nature's rules, that we're masters over nature, and that ideology is incorrect.

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

Physicist who developed the theory of relativity and E=mc².

Abraham Maslow (a famous psychologist) once commented, 'if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail'. Investors currently have a hammer, and that hammer is economics.

Chief Strategist & Senior Currency Strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex

At some point, if this kind of technological progress continues, it would seem that our descendants will become entirely digital: uploads or artificial intellects implemented on computers. At that point, it is possible that evolutionary selection will again become an important driver of change—but not necessarily of change for the better.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

Intelligence is a big deal. Humanity owes its dominant position on Earth not to any special strength of our muscles, nor any unusual sharpness of our teeth, but to the unique ingenuity of our brains. It is our brains that are responsible for the complex social organization and the accumulation of technical, economic, and scientific advances that, for better and worse, underpin modern civilization.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

the printing press helped democratise Europe by providing space for discussion and agreement among politically engaged citizens, often before the state had fully democratised.

German Philosopher & Social Theorist; Developed Theory of Communicative Action

We therefore see the drone (robot) exhibiting (through software) signs of the moral-affective function of 'guilt' when engaging in each mission. The aim of such developments is to introduce a level of ethics into the battlefield which, as more drones and high power long range weapons are used, is becoming increasingly fraught with collateral damage.

Roboticist & Pioneer of Ethical Autonomous Systems and Robot Ethics

If it did more damage than expected—for example, if a nearby cemetery or mosque was harmed by an attack on a suspected terrorist safe house—then it could use this information to restrict its choice of weapon in future engagements. It could also pass the information to other drones.

Roboticist & Pioneer of Ethical Autonomous Systems and Robot Ethics

This timely book outlines and directly addresses the ethical dilemmas posed by the development of autonomous military robots, which will confront roboticists and military policy makers in the future. Arkin's thesis, that appropriately designed military robots will be better able to avoid civilian casualties than existing human war-fighters and might therefore make future wars more ethical, is likely to be the subject of intense debate and controversy for years to come.

Roboticist & Pioneer of Ethical Autonomous Systems and Robot Ethics

After each strike the drone would be updated with information about the actual destruction caused. It would note any damage to nearby buildings and would subsequently receive information from other sources, such as soldiers in the area, fixed cameras on the ground and other aircraft. Using this information, it could compare the level of destruction it expected with what actually happened.

Roboticist & Pioneer of Ethical Autonomous Systems and Robot Ethics

There really is a very weak moral justification for these weapons that mainly relies on the concept of deterrence—that their purpose is to prevent another country from attacking you with them. That case is so weak that you see major global institutions like the U.S. Catholic Church condemn nuclear weapons as immoral.

Nuclear weapons expert and president of the Ploughshares Fund.