Reader > Reader's Quotes

“The problem with solutionism... It assumes that rationality has the tools to solve every problem. ... We think problems are decidable because we only see the decidable ones. We don't see the infinite number of problems we can't solve because it's so difficult even to describe them. We are finite creations and can solve problems only if we can develop algorithms --finite procedures-- for reaching the correct answers. Most problems do not have solutions that are reducible to finite procedures. To assume the world is built so we can figure it out is absurd.”
― Scott J. Shapiro, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

“here’s a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we’re sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we?”
― Matt Harvey

“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

“Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, who was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron, often considered the first software engineer, dreamed about doing calculations by machine. This pair was a century ahead of their time. They developed concepts such as stored programs, self-modifying code, addressable memory, conditional branching, and com-puter programming, all of which were foundations for modern compu-ting.”
― Rico Roho, Primer for Alien Contact

“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along--the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing _Ender's Game_, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective--the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult's. ... _Ender's Game_ asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way ... are going to find _Ender's Game_ a very unpleasant place to live.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.”
― Dorothy Allison

“There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don't understand what quality in a mind is yet, even though we might someday. Either of those opinions allows one to distinguish quantity and quality. In order to confuse quantity and quality, you have to reject both possibilities. The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality. They want to live in an airtight reality that resembles an idealized computer program, in which everything is understood and there are no fundamental mysteries. They recoil from even the hint of a potential zone of mystery or an unresolved seam in one's worldview. This desire for absolute order usually leads to tears in human affairs, so there is a historical reason to distrust it. Materialist extremists have long seemed determined to win a race with religious fanatics: Who can do the most damage to the most people?”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhumans.

A follow-up question that I often get is: “What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?”

Vivisection, Part One: The “Necessity” of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach”
― GaryLFrancione

“Do you know why he became so angry when you started asking him questions? It was not because you were defying him or challenging him. It was because you made him think, for the briefest second, about what he was doing to you. Bullies do not like that. If they are forced to remember that you are a person just like them, that means they have to consider that they are wrong, that they are cruel.”
― Matt Wallace, The Supervillain's Guide to Being a Fat Kid: A Humorous Middle Grade Novel About Standing Up to Bullies for Kids

“In a post-Enlightenment 'scientific' context, to challenge the axiom of human exceptionalism is to indulge in anthropomorphism, because while we might think we see manifestations of personhood in animal others, what we are really doing is attributing human characteristics to animals. This is because only humans can be persons.”
― Samantha Hurn, Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions

“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
― Aristotle