#artificial

I would like to feel that I have a range and that it's not just a matter of being a comic actor or a serious actor, because those are really artificial classifications, I think. ↗

— Jeffrey Jones

#artificial #because #being #comic #feel

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. ↗

— H. P. Lovecraft

#backgrounds #bludgeon #conformity #consequences #followers

In several sections, both natural in the banks of the Mississippi and its numerous arms, and where artificial canals had been cut, I observed erect stumps of trees, with their roots attached, buried in strata at different heights, one over the other. ↗

— Charles Lyell

#artificial #attached #banks #been #both

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop. ↗

— David Eagleman

#evolution #science #intelligence

No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial. ↗

— Agnes Smedley

#conceived #far #how #how far #knows

Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem! ↗

— Steven Pinker

#artificial-intelligence #ethics #malevolence #robots #attitude

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith. ↗

— Peter Watts

#comprehension #data-analysis #post-modern-technofaith #wisdom #faith

When it’s not enough to veto your children’s tendencies, you must in vitro them. ↗

— Bauvard

#children #funny #humor #parenting #funny

I think they are a better race than humans ever were. ↗

— Angelo Tsanatelis

#cyberpunk #cyborg #genetic-engineering #science-fiction #intelligence

Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. Tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft. ↗

— Charles Yu

#software #intelligence