From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Images signify- mainly- something 'out there' in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions.
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.
The only reason we are the master of anything today is because of our intelligence. We're not the strongest species on the planet. We're not the biggest, we're not the most resilient. We're quite fragile and in all honesty, without our intelligence, we're quite irrelevant. The reality is, when they are smarter than we are, it is wishful thinking that they will continue to be connected to us.
I'm a school drop-out that is now teaching professors and doctors around the world; all because of a naïve woman's wish for her child to live.
I think that most of us, when we give to charity, hope that we ultimately help people live happier, less miserable lives. So we should measure what we care about.
a compelling call to action that will stay with you long after you've turned the last page.
I often have odd conversations where people say, 'Should we take happiness seriously?' And I pause and ask, 'How do you feel about misery and suffering—are those not bad? Do they not matter at all?' Then they admit, 'Oh yeah'. I then ask 'so, don't you think it's good if people enjoy their lives?' And they say, 'I suppose so.' So, everyone agrees happiness matters to some extent – but we often forget this and need to bring it to the surface.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about demography and one of the biggest misunderstandings is that it's destiny. If it's destiny, it is not that interesting to study, but it's not destiny.
We are creatures of history, yet we have this idea that we are alienated from our past – and that's a deep problem. Language is a product of thousands of years of history. The words that we speak are not our own. The ideas we have are not our own. They come from many other sources, stretching back hundreds, and thousands of years. The past is extremely alive in the present moment.
Quantum mechanics says our world is nebulous, fuzzy, a haze of possibilities until it somehow snaps to attention upon an appropriate interaction, observation or measurement. That's a very strange reality, and the fact that this theory is so demonstrably correct is radically important to our understanding.
Music is also incorruptible in many ways. I can hear when music isn't authentic, or when it isn't coming from the heart and soul. Music is a pure, universal, language that can transcend.
I realised that what people do is, instead of figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it whether they want to or not, doing the ethical thing, what they do is they figure out what they want to do and then come up with the rationalisation for doing it, whether it's right or wrong. And we fool ourselves.