Frances Coronel > Frances's Quotes

“There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of Computer Science that's like religion.”
― Hal Abelson

“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.”
― Donald E. Knuth, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (Volume 136)

“‎By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.”
― Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

“the mind is a neural computer”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Faith does not protect you. Medicine and airbags... Those are the things that protect you. God does not protect you. Intelligence protects you. Enlightenment. Put your faith in something with tangible results. How long has it been since someone walked on water? Modern miracles belong to science.. Computers, vaccines, space stations... Even the devine miracle of creation. Matter from nothing... In a lab. Who needs God? No! Science is God!”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“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, How the Mind Works

“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“Fast and stupid is still stupid. It just gets you to stupid a lot quicker than humans could on their own. Which, I admit, is an accomplishment," she added, "because we're pretty damn good at stupid.”
― Jack Campbell, Invincible

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.

The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“No matter how close, you are always too far. My eyes are drawn everywhere you are...”
― Cora Carmack, Losing It

“I can resist anything except temptation.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“Darkness feeds on apathy.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”
― The Economist

“Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.”
― Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

“Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes.”
― Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
― Mark Twain

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”
― Charles Bukowski and Carl Weissner

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
― Charles Bukowski