Philosophy

If our future is to count as a utopia, we cannot allow a massive oppressed class of hyper-sentient, uncomfortable digital beings. We want it to be good for all kinds of minds.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

We're not really creating a specific artefact—we're setting a direction for a process. There's no upper limit to that process; we're simply saying we'll create something capable of becoming smarter and smarter.

AI Safety Researcher & Director of Cybersecurity Lab at University of Louisville

Much of our future work may end up being about convincing them that we are conscious, and worth keeping around.

AI Safety Researcher & Director of Cybersecurity Lab at University of Louisville

Arguably, it could be more comparable to the rise of Homo sapiens itself, or even to the origin of life on Earth.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

The truth is, any book about pets is really a book about humans. It's not about the pets themselves. I'm always amused when friends send me pictures of their dog or cat, because I'm tempted to write back and say, 'If you're not in the picture, it's a misrepresentation of what's going on.'

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet

We assumed matter was fundamental when we probably should have prioritised consciousness. If we viewed consciousness as the prima materia of reality itself, I think we'd know a lot more about these intelligences and hidden agents than we do today.

It forces you to confront the fact that we know almost nothing about the true nature of reality. Whatever image you have of what's real or possible is obliterated in an instant. You're faced with a world that isn't just strange, but so utterly incomprehensible that it transcends imagination.

We never have direct access to the world in itself; we only have access to the model our brain is constructing. It works as a sort of 'best guess.' The brain isn't trying to find the absolute truth or create a perfect replica of the outside world's structure.

For a long time there was a kind of cultural chauvinism: the idea that if you just played Mozart to people in the Amazon or to hunter-gatherer groups in the South Pacific, they'd instantly recognize its greatness, maybe even see God. But of course, they don't experience it that way at all.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

In real life, emotions rarely arrive in neat, isolated packages. They're layered, overlapping, constantly shifting. Pure happiness, for instance, is rare; most of the time it's tinged with something else. And music, more than words, captures that mixture.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. Trust isn't, at its essence, an asset or an attribute or a currency. It's a belief. It's what we believe about someone or something.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

What we envision is humans using informal reasoning and intuition as a powerful guide, with formal systems then verifying those ideas. In this way, the formal system grounds high-level intuition.

When you tell people these things, they get a little fatalistic about it. They tend to think, 'Well, I guess there's not much I can do about that.' I would call that a bias. It is wrong just as often as it's likely to be right. We really need to interrogate and deconstruct that assumption. It's rarely true, and it can lead people to internalise some of these effects in a way that can be pretty damaging and totally unnecessary.

I think that we must move to a model where we value nature differently and work by integrating with nature. We just have to start innovating at a faster scale, and doing it in a way where we can then communicate those innovation wins to the next generation in a way that gets them excited and gives them hope.

We have a significant ability to change our cognitive trajectory. But first, we need to believe it's possible. And second, we need to engage in the things that allow it to happen.

Think about a rabbit sitting in a field. If that rabbit saw a hawk circling above and decided to wait for the back-propagation step before responding, it would be dead. The better you model the world, and the faster you can act on that model, the more likely your genes are to survive.