Where the Future Goes: Quotes on Artificial Intelligence & Our Takeaways

“There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035.” — Gray Scott

Living in a probabilistic universe is fun. With everything possible, we love to speculate about the future and how technologies can change it. Take, for example, artificial intelligence (AI). Once the subject of science fiction, it is now the centerpiece of autonomous vehicles, computer vision, machine learning, and speech recognition, among many other groundbreaking innovations.

But we are still trying to figure out the long-term consequences of artificial intelligence and whether it is the right path to take in the first place. Amidst tons of AI quotes and catchy AI taglines, one of the loudest voices are those warning about the dire consequences of artificial intelligence, including the demise of humanity.

Here are some less-than-enthusiastic quotes on AI:

• “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 Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”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 have to expect the machines to take control.” — Alan Turing.

AI may seem bound to render us useless or erase us altogether, but is it that bad? As scary as some quotes on artificial intelligence are, the proponents of artificial intelligence are still in the majority.

Here are some positive quotes on AI:

• “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

Do these positive artificial intelligence quotes inspire you, or are you leaning toward the ones proclaiming threats and dangers? The truth is usually in the middle: it might as well be that AI can do harm or good depending on how it’s programmed and used.

 

1. Technological Singularity is Around the Corner

“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

Singularity is a popular AI tagline, but what does it really mean?

• The technological singularity, or simply singularity, is when artificial intelligence outpaces humans so much that its growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unpredictable changes to human civilization.

Source: Time Magazine

Too many humans quote singularity as our greatest and last accomplishment. However, as remarkable as our progress is, singularity is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future for two reasons:

• Moore’s law doesn’t hold: Having held spectacularly well throughout the XX century, Moore’s law – the one stipulating that the number of transistors on microchips will double roughly every two years – is slowing down. Processors can’t get more densely packed than they already are. Quantum computing may get us back on track, but it’s unclear how quantum technologies will affect computing.

Source: The Economist

• Technological advancements plateau over time: It took us 28 years to advance from E = mc² to the first nuclear bomb, but we still haven’t come up with net-cost-positive fusion power. We’ve plateaued out in our ability to use energy, the same way we will likely plateau out in the growth of computing power.

Source: Research Gate

2. AI Will Define Businesses in the XXI Century

“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

As much as we don’t want to overestimate the rise of artificial intelligence, we don’t want to underestimate it either. It’s already obvious that AI is here to stay – at least for a while, if not forever – remunerating early adopters and leaving laggards behind.

Numbers don’t lie:

• 34% of high-tech and 45% of telecom companies already use AI.
• The worldwide AI market revenue is expected to grow from $327.5 billion in 2021 to $1.5 trillion by 2030.
• The demand for AI specialists has grown by 300% between 2015 and 2019.

Throughout the first quarter of the XXI century, the advancement of AI mostly focused on mathematics, linguistics, and logical reasoning. In the following decades, it may also cover emotional intelligence.

Source: Shutterstock

“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 trying to unleash the full potential of omnichannel learning so AI can comprehend the world more like humans do. Google, Microsoft, IBM, and thousands of smaller AI companies are actively developing AI applications, while the biggest world retailers and wholesalers (Amazon, eBay, etc.) are investing in AI to improve their e-commerce platforms.

3. AI Will Become Conscious in Foreseeable Future

“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

Artificial intelligence taglines are fun and all, but claiming that AI is about to become conscious is quite an overstatement. Frankly speaking, we don’t even know what consciousness is and how it emerges.

We don’t know how exactly bioelectrical signals create thoughts, feelings, and sensations, let alone how – and if possible – to build a conscious AI.

• No machine has consciousness, nor are there any self-aware AI prototypes. No machine has self-perception or even primitive consciousness.

Source: The Institute of Information & Technology

Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, proposed a notable explanation for AI consciousness. In his paper, Turing suggests the so-called Imitation Game in which a machine tries to deceive a human being into believing that the machine is a human. A machine able to cope with the task can be determined as conscious.

As you might have guessed, no current AI prototype can pull it off.

4. Artificial Intelligence Will End the Human Race

“Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. 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

There’s no reason to assume that super-advanced artificial intelligence wouldn’t dominate us the way we dominate other species. AI can evolve incredibly fast in Chess, Go, and Shogi, surpassing human capabilities by orders of magnitude.

• AlphaZero, a generic reinforcement learning algorithm, was able to outplay Stockfish while evaluating thousands of times fewer positions – 80,000 per second against 70 million per second – using its deep neural network that enables a selective focus on the most promising moves.

Extrapolate that, and you can conclude AI can progress in several – possibly all – dimensions incredibly fast if programmed accordingly and given enough computing power.

But then again, although we can’t discount AI’s existential threat, we shouldn’t exaggerate it either. Much of the concerns, including those of Musk, come from our inability to use AI exclusively for good purposes. Like with many other technologies, there’s always a chance that the focus will be pulled to the military, resulting in tyrants and terrorists being the primary beneficiaries.

5. AI Will Make Us Immortal

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

Remember the immortal jellyfish, the one reversing its biological cycle? Biological immortality is possible if we combine intelligence and biotechnology most effectively. For that, we should let AI compare the genetic data of young and old to locate the age genes. Next, we can edit or remove aging genes. In 2022, we’ve become one step closer to the breakthrough by fully sequencing the human genome.

Besides biological immortality, there’s digital immortality. It might be possible one day to create a fully-fledged digital copy of ourselves. This, however, is based on several assumptions:

1. Our mind is no more than a specific arrangement of neurons.
2. It’s computable (can be simulated).
3. At some point, we will fully understand our brain and have the technology to create its digital copy.

 

6. AI Will Make Us Unemployed

“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.

Many artificial intelligence quotes accuse AI of rendering millions of people unemployed, with hard evidence in place. Around 30% of people are expected to be replaced by robots by 2030, a global economic shift echoing the Great Depression.

However, looking back, we can safely say that so far, every technological shift created more jobs than replaced. This was the case throughout the XIX and XX centuries, so chances are that history will repeat itself. After all, this is how progress goes: those able to adapt, survive, and thrive while those unwilling to embrace the new reality slowly wilt.

Source: IoT For All

7. AI Will Accurately Predict the Future

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

Machine algorithms are advancing day by day, being able to read lips, play hide-and-seek, calculate the future risk of suicide, and help in the fight against cancer, among many other things.

As accurate as AI can be, two significant setbacks keep it from calculating complex systems:

• Lack of causal reasoning. AI can accurately predict where a foot-kicked football goes, but it cannot explain why the football shouldn’t reverse in flight, barely understanding the underlying web of causes.
• Stochasticity. AI is brilliant at predicting events with any number of known variables (a game of chess), but it struggles whenever the initial conditions are unclear (presidential elections in 2060). For example, AI cannot predict a child’s future success, no matter how much data is given.

Should these two issues be addressed, we may be able to predict our future with much more accuracy.

Final Thoughts: The Best Quotes on Artificial Intelligence, by Categories

Top-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

Top-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 civilization – 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

Top-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

Top-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 platformization 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

Top-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

Top-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 visualize 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

Top-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 obliterate 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

Frequently Asked Questions

What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
Artificial intelligence is the technology that leverages computers and machines to reproduce human-like problem-solving and decision-making. AI is the ever-evolving human-based intelligence created to make our world a better place.

What is machine learning?
Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence aimed at imitating intelligent human behavior to solve complex problems in a way similar to how humans solve problems.

Where is artificial intelligence used today?
Artificial intelligence is used in finance, healthcare, education, transportation manufacturing, and many other areas of life and business. The most common examples of AI use are self-driving cars, smart assistance, chatbots, automated financial investing, healthcare management, and more.

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