Smarter Than Us Quotes

“If an AI possessed any one of these skills—social abilities, technological development, economic ability—at a superhuman level, it is quite likely that it would quickly come to dominate our world in one way or another. And as we’ve seen, if it ever developed these abilities to the human level, then it would likely soon develop them to a superhuman level. So we can assume that if even one of these skills gets programmed into a computer, then our world will come to be dominated by AIs or AI-empowered humans.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“[A]s a species, we are very poor at programming. Our brains are built to understand other humans, not computers. We’re terrible at forcing our minds into the precise modes of thought needed to interact with a computer, and we consistently make errors when we try. That's why computer science and programming degrees take such time and dedication to acquire: we are literally learning how to speak to an alien mind, of a kind that has not existed on Earth until very recently.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“Since our intelligence has achieved so much, it should be obvious we should not fear the robot, which is nothing but an armed and armored bear. Instead, we should fear entities that are capable of beating us at our own game. It is the “intelligence” part of “artificial intelligence” that we have to fear.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“This short book will argue that human-level AIs—I’ll just call them “AIs” from now on—are plausible, that they could become extremely powerful, that we need to solve many problems in ethics and mathematics in order to program them safely, and that our current expertise is far from adequate for the task.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“The AI will be compelled to change our preferences to best reach its goal.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“So we don’t need the AI to be as moral as a human; we need it to be much, much more moral than us, since it’s being put in such an unprecedented position of power.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“it seems we need to solve nearly all of moral philosophy in order to program a safe AI.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“the AI will eventually be able to predict any move we make and could spend a lot of effort manipulating those who have “control” over it.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“humans will be compelled to turn more and more of their decision making over to the AI. Inevitably, the humans will be out of the loop for all but a few key decisions.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“Even the best human software has about one error for every ten thousand lines of code, and most have many more than that.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“True AIs, though, will likely be far more powerful and far more inhuman than any beings that have populated our stories.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments,”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“The Terminator is a creature from our primordial nightmares: tall, strong, aggressive, and nearly indestructible. We’re strongly primed to fear such a being—it resembles the lions, tigers, and bears that our ancestors so feared when they wandered alone on the savanna and tundra.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

“About the Author After a misspent youth doing mathematical and medical research, Stuart Armstrong was blown away by the idea that people would actually pay him to work on the most important problems facing humanity. He hasn’t looked back since, and has been focusing mainly on existential risk, anthropic probability, AI, decision theory, moral uncertainty, and long-term space exploration. He also walks the dog a lot, and was recently involved in the coproduction of the strange intelligent agent that is a human baby.”
― Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence