AI Quotes: Forecasting Tomorrow’s Tech & Our Takeaways on Intelligence

Oleksandr Rohovnin

17 minutes read

It is entertaining to live in a probabilistic world where there are no limits. We like making predictions about the future and how technology may alter it. 

Take artificial intelligence (AI): It was the focus of science fiction once, but now it is at the core of many ground-breaking discoveries, including voice recognition, computer vision, machine learning, and autonomous cars.

However, there is still much to learn about the long-term effects of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, the voices of those warning about the grave effects of artificial intelligence are among the loudest:

• “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.” — Stephen Hawking.
• “I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. I mean, with artificial intelligence, we’re summoning the demon.” — Elon Musk.
• “It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage, therefore, we should expect the machines to take control.” — Alan Turing.

AI seems destined to make us useless, but is it that bad? 

Here are some positive quotes on artificial intelligence:

• “I imagine a world in which AI is going to make us work more productively, live longer, and have cleaner energy.” — Fei-Fei Li.
• “To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations.” — Oren Etzioni.
• “Our intelligence is what makes us human, and AI is an extension of that quality. Artificial intelligence is extending what we can do with our abilities. In this way, it’s letting us become more human.” — Yann LeCun.

1. The Dawn of Technological Singularity Approaches

“Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity – technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.” — Raymond Kurzweil.

The tagline “singularity” is often used in AI, but what does it mean?

• The technological singularity, also known as the singularity, is when artificial intelligence surpasses human capacity to the point that its growth becomes irreversible and uncontrollable, leading to unanticipated transformations in human civilisation.

Source: Time Magazine

There are too many people who quote that singularity is our biggest and last accomplishment. However, notwithstanding our progress, singularity probably won’t happen in the near future for two reasons:

• Moore’s law doesn’t hold: Moore’s law, which stipulates that there will be twice as many transistors in microchips every two years, is starting to slow down, although it worked amazingly well throughout the XX century. There can’t be any further reduction in the density of processors.

Source: The Economist

• The pace of technological advancements slows down with time: after all, we are still unable to develop net-cost-positive fusion power, although it took us 28 years to go from E= mc² to the first nuclear bomb. Just as our ability to use energy has plateaued, so too will the expansion of computing power probably reach a plateau.

Source: Research Gate

2. The XXI Century Business Landscape Will Be Shaped by AI

“Reaping rewards will be among the most important trends over the next 10 years. I believe companies will be rewarded for their efforts moving from models either in pilots or MVPs to full deployment at a large scale.” — Nir Kaldero

Though we don’t want to overstate how quickly AI is rising, we also don’t want to underestimate it either. Artificial intelligence is clearly to stay, if not forever, then at least for a while, since it remunerates early adopters and leaves behind those who don’t adapt.

The numbers speak for themselves:

• 45% of telecom businesses and 34% of high-tech enterprises now employ AI.
• From $327.5 billion in 2021 to $1.5 trillion in 2030, the worldwide AI market revenue is expected to grow.
• Between 2015 and 2019, the demand for AI specialists has grown by 300%.

During the first quarter of the XXI century, AI progress was mostly focused on linguistics, mathematics, and logical reasoning. Emotional intelligence may also be covered in the coming decades.

“Emotions are essential parts of human intelligence. Without emotional intelligence, Artificial Intelligence will remain incomplete. AI-based compassionate robots can channel virtually unlimited resources into building compassionate relationships in the society.” — Amit Ray.

Google DeepMind is already working to fully use omnichannel learning in order for artificial intelligence to gain a human-level understanding of the world. The largest world wholesalers and retailers (Amazon, eBay, etc.) are investing in artificial intelligence to enhance their e-commerce platforms, while Google, Microsoft, IBM, and thousands of smaller AI businesses are actively creating AI applications.

3. Artificial Intelligence: An Impending Reality

“We currently have no credible research path to any kind of conscious AI algorithm and there are no robots that are truly autonomous or able to make their own decisions — so don’t worry about walking terminators.” — Richard Socher

Though AI taglines are entertaining, the idea that AI is on the verge of becoming conscious is quite an overstatement. The truth is that we have no idea where or how consciousness emerges from.

Not only do we not know how bioelectrical signals create sensations, thoughts, and feelings, but we also do not know how possible it is to make a conscious AI.

• There are no self-aware AI prototypes, nor are there any machines that possess consciousness. There is no such thing as self-perception or even primitive consciousness in a machine.

The notable explanation for AI consciousness was put out by Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science. In his paper, Turing proposes the “Imitation Game,” in which a computer attempts to fool a human into thinking a machine is a human. A machine may be determined as conscious if it is able to cope with the task.

As you may have guessed, no current AI prototype can do it today.

4. Artificial Intelligence Supremacy: The Twilight of Humanity

“Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it.” — Stephen Hawking

We tend to dominate other species, so there’s no reason to assume that a super-advanced artificial intelligence wouldn’t do the same to us. In games such as Go, Shogi, and Chess, AI may advance very quickly, which is orders of magnitude faster than the capabilities of humans.

• By using its deep neural network to focus on the most promising movements selectively, the general reinforcement learning algorithm AlphaZero defeated Stockfish while evaluating thousands of times fewer positions (80,000 position evaluations per second instead of 70 million).

If you extrapolate it, you can see AI can very quickly progress in several dimensions, possibly all, if it is given enough computing power and programmed accordingly.

On the other hand, although we shouldn’t minimise AI’s existential threat, we also shouldn’t overstate it. Many of the concerns, including those of Musk, are worried about our inability to use AI exclusively for beneficial reasons. Just as with many other technologies comes the risk that the focus will be pulled to the military, possibly resulting in being used by terrorists and tyrants.

5. Artificial Intelligence: The Gateway to Eternal Life

“What use was time to those who’d soon achieve digital immortality?” — Clyde Dsouza

Do you remember the immortal jellyfish that is reversing its biological cycle around? If we can effectively combine biotechnology and intelligence, biological immortality might be achieved. To do this, we need to allow AI to locate the age genes by comparing the genetic data of the young and elderly. The next step is to edit or remove rid of genes that cause ageing. By completely sequencing the human genome in 2022, we’ve moved one step closer to the discovery.

There is also digital immortality, in addition to biological immortality. Maybe in the future, we may be able to make a fully-fledged digital copy of ourselves. 

Nevertheless, this is based on some assumptions:

1. The human mind is nothing more than a specific arrangement of neurons.
2. It’s simulated and calculable.
3. We will eventually find out all there is to know about the human brain and have the technology to replicate it digitally.

6. AI Displacing Human Jobs

“Humans need and want more time to interact with each other. I think AI coming about and replacing routine jobs is pushing us to do what we should be doing anyway: the creation of more humanistic service jobs.” — Kai-Fu Lee

There is hard evidence to support the many quotes that AI is responsible for the unemployment of millions of people. It is projected that by 2030, robots will replace around 30% of human labour, a global economic shift reminiscent of the Great Depression.

But if we look back, we can say with confidence that every technological shift has so far created more jobs than replaced. Since this was the situation in the XIX and XX centuries, it is likely that history will repeat again. This is, after all, how progress works: those who can survive, adapt, and thrive do so, while those who are unable to accept the new reality gradually wilt.

Source: IoT For All

7. AI Will Accurately Forecasting the Future

“Predicting the future isn’t magic, it’s artificial intelligence.” – Dave Waters

Machine algorithms are becoming more and more advanced every day. They can now play hide-and-seek, read lips, help in the fight against cancer, and calculate the future risk of suicide, among many other things.

No matter how accurate AI is, it still can’t be calculating complex systems due to two significant setbacks:

• Causal reasoning is lacking. While AI is able to predict where a foot-kicked football goes with high accuracy, it is unable to explain why the football shouldn’t reverse in midair; it only barely understands the underlying web of causes.
• Stochasticity. AI is very good at predicting what will happen when a number of known variables are used (like in chess), but AI fails to make accurate predictions when the starting conditions are unclear (like in the 2060 presidential election). For example, no matter how much data is given, AI can’t tell what kind of success a child will have in the future.

If we can solve these two problems, we might be able to tell the future a lot more accurately.

Concluding Thoughts: The Top Quotes on Artificial Intelligence Broken Down by Category

The Best 5 Short Quotes on AI

• “A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.” — Alan Perlis
• “Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.” — Nick Bostrom
• “By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky
• “Competition for AI superiority at national level is the most likely cause of WW3.” — Elon Musk
• “Any A.I. smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.” — Ian McDonald

The Best 5 Quotes on Future Technology

• “Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, and we will have multiplied the intelligence – the human biological machine intelligence of our civilisation – a billion-fold.” — Ray Kurzweil
• “The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly. You could ask ‘what should I ask Larry?’ and it would tell you.” — Larry Page
• “Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.” — Ginni Rometty
• “Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” — Christian Lous Lange
• “In our business, we talk about emerging technologies and how they impact society. We’ve never seen a technology move as fast as AI has to impact society and technology. This is by far the fastest moving technology that we’ve ever tracked in terms of its impact and we’re just getting started.” — Paul Daugherty

The Best 5 Quotes on Machine Learning

• “Artificial intelligence and machine learning, as a dominant discipline within AI, is an amazing tool. In and of itself, it’s not good or bad. It’s not a magic solution. It isn’t the core of the problems in the world.” — Vivienne Ming
• “Harnessing machine learning can be transformational, but for it to be successful, enterprises need leadership from the top. This means understanding that when machine learning changes one part of the business — the product mix, for example — then other parts must also change. This can include everything from marketing and production to supply chain, and even hiring and incentive systems.” — Erik Brynjolfsson
• There’s improved lead generation that machine learning can do better than humans. And then there’s the Westworld-style ‘is it murder if you kill a robot’ scenario. There’s a big gap between those two things. I think you can start working on understanding the business problems now before you have to worry about Skynet taking over. Knock down the things AI can solve now.” — Michael Chiu
• “We are entering a new world. The technologies of machine learning, speech recognition, and natural language understanding are reaching a nexus of capability. The end result is that we’ll soon have artificially intelligent assistants to help us in every aspect of our lives.” — Amy Stapleton
• “Much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. Though less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type — quietly but meaningfully improving core operations.” — Jeff Bezos

The Best 5 Quotes on Human Intelligence Enhancement

• “Nobody phrases it this way, but I think that artificial intelligence is almost a humanities discipline. It’s really an attempt to understand human intelligence and human cognition.” — Sebastian Thrun
• “If we do it right, we might be able to evolve a form of work that taps into our uniquely human capabilities and restores our humanity. The ultimate paradox is that this technology may become a powerful catalyst that we need to reclaim our humanity.” — John Hagel
• “As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership.” — Amit Ray
• “The gradual platformisation of AI is very interesting to me. The efforts by Google, Amazon, Salesforce — they’re bringing AI down to a level of not needing to be an expert to use it. … I think the day that any good software engineer can program AI will be the day it really proliferates.” — Kai-Fu Lee
• “I think what makes AI different from other technologies is that it’s going to bring humans and machines closer together. AI is sometimes incorrectly framed as machines replacing humans. It’s not about machines replacing humans, but machines augmenting humans. Humans and machines have different relative strengths and weaknesses, and it’s about the combination of these two that will allow human intents and business process to scale 10x, 100x, and beyond that in the coming years.” — Robin Bordoli

The Best 5 Quotes about Robots

• “Robots are not going to replace humans, they are going to make their jobs much more humane. Difficult, demeaning, demanding, dangerous, dull – these are the jobs robots will be taking.” — Sabine Hauert
• “The countries with the highest robot density have among the lowest unemployment rates. Technology and humans combined in the right way will drive prosperity.” — Ulrich Spiesshofer
• “Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.” — Diane Ackerman
• “Everything that moves will be autonomous someday, whether partially or fully. Breakthroughs in AI have made all kinds of robots possible, and we are working with companies around the world to build these amazing machines.” — Jensen Huang
• “There are lots of examples of routine, middle-skilled jobs that involve relatively structured tasks, and those are the jobs that are being eliminated the fastest. Those kinds of jobs are easier for our friends in the artificial intelligence community to design robots to handle them. They could be software robots; they could be physical robots.” — Erik Brynjolfsson

The Best 5 Man vs. Machine Quotes

• “Artificial Intelligence is not a Man versus Machine saga; it’s in fact, Man with Machine synergy.” — Sudipto Ghosh
• “You have to talk about ‘The Terminator’ if you’re talking about artificial intelligence. I actually think that that’s way off. I don’t think that an artificially intelligent system that has superhuman intelligence will be violent. I do think that it will disrupt our culture.” — Gray Scott
• “I visualise a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.” — Claude Shannon
• “We have seen AI providing conversation and comfort to the lonely; we have also seen AI engaging in racial discrimination. Yet the biggest harm that AI is likely to do to individuals in the short term is job displacement, as the amount of work we can automate with AI is vastly larger than before. As leaders, it is incumbent on all of us to make sure we are building a world in which every individual has an opportunity to thrive.” — Andrew Ng
• “We must address, individually and collectively, moral and ethical issues raised by cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which will enable significant life extension, designer babies, and memory extraction.” — Klaus Schwab

The Best 5 Negative Technology Quotes

• “The upheavals of artificial intelligence can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to eliminate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.” — Nick Bilton
• “AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity – if AI has a goal and humanity just happens to come in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it, no hard feelings.” — Elon Musk
• “The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast—it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year time frame. Ten years at most.” — Elon Musk
• “I’m more frightened than interested by artificial intelligence – in fact, perhaps fright and interest are not far away from one another. Things can become real in your mind, you can be tricked, and you believe things you wouldn’t ordinarily. A world run by automatons doesn’t seem completely unrealistic anymore. It’s a bit chilling.” — Gemma Whelan
• “I don’t want to really scare you, but it was alarming how many people I talked to who are highly placed people in AI who have retreats that are sort of ‘bug out’ houses, to which they could flee if it all hits the fan.” — James Barrat

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