1209: Artificial Intelligence is Not One Thing
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/17
Elon Musk
“AI is likely to be either the best or worst thing to happen to humanity.”
Stephen Hawking
“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 Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
Ray Kurzweil
“Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence — the human biological-machine intelligence — of our civilization a billion-fold.”
Larry Page
“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.”
Klaus Schwab
“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.”
Peter Diamandis
“If the government regulates against use of drones or stem cells or artificial intelligence, all that means is that the work and the research leave the borders of that country and go someplace else.”
Colin Angle
“It’s going to be interesting to see how society deals with artificial intelligence, but it will definitely be cool.”
Alan Kay
“Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.”
Alan Perlis
“A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.”
B.F. Skinner
“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”
Tom Chatfield
“Forget artificial intelligence — in the brave new world of big data, it’s artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.”
Fei-Fei Li
“Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human intelligence; it is a tool to amplify human creativity and ingenuity.”
Kai-Fu Lee
“I believe AI is going to change the world more than anything in the history of humanity — more than electricity.”
John McCarthy
“Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans.”
Timnit Gebru
“We’re seeing a kind of Wild West situation with AI and regulation right now. The scale at which businesses are adopting AI technologies isn’t matched by clear guidelines to regulate algorithms and help researchers avoid the pitfalls of bias in datasets.”
Emad Mostaque
“We’re just trying to race to keep up with the societal impact of all this. And one of the reasons for creating Stability was so that we could create some standards… If I watched all of YouTube, I’d be a bit crazy too.”
Clem Delangue
“I think it’s promising that we have policymakers who are trying to get smart about this technology and get in front of risks before we’ve had mass deployment across the product space. I think there are some very obvious things that we need to establish, one of which is the right to know whether you’re consuming content from a bot or not.”
Terah Lyons
“The problem that needs to be addressed is that the government itself needs to get a better handle on how technology systems interact with the citizenry. Secondarily, there needs to be more cross-talk between industry, civil society, and academic organizations working to advance these technologies and the government institutions that are going to be representing them.”
Erik Brynjolfsson
“In this era of profound digital transformation, it’s important to remember that business, as well as government, has a role to play in creating shared prosperity — not just prosperity.”
Yann LeCun
“Our intelligence is what makes us human, and AI is an extension of that quality.”
Gita Gopinath
“Forty percent of the global workforce is exposed to AI — that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Some fraction of that will benefit; it will raise their productivity. That fraction is about half of that forty percent, and the other half will have a hard time — maybe lower wages, displacement, and so on.”
António Guterres
“Warn of the existential threat posed by the runaway development of AI without guard rails and its potential to increase inequality… We need governments urgently to work with tech companies on risk-management frameworks for current AI development, and on monitoring and mitigating future harms.”
Sam Altman
“We have our own nervousness, but we believe that we can manage through it, and the only way to do that is to put the technology in the hands of people. Let society and the technology co-evolve, and, step by step with a very tight feedback loop and course correction, build these systems that deliver tremendous value while meeting safety requirements.”
Gray Scott
“You have to talk about ‘The Terminator’ if you’re talking about artificial intelligence. I actually think that that’s way off. I do think that it will disrupt our culture.”
James Barrat
“I don’t want to really scare you, but it was alarming how many people I talked to who are highly placed in AI who have retreats that are sort of ‘bug-out’ houses, to which they could flee if it all hits the fan.”
Sybil Sage
“Someone on TV has only to say, ‘Alexa,’ and she lights up. She’s always ready for action, the perfect woman, never says, ‘Not tonight, dear.’”
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