The Age of AI and Our Human Future Quotes

“When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom. Yet the internet inundates users with the opinions of thousands, even millions, of other users, depriving them of the solitude required for sustained reflection that, historically, has led to the development of convictions. As solitude diminishes, so, too, does fortitude—not only to develop convictions but also to be faithful to them, particularly when they require the traversing of novel, and”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“Created by humans, AI should be overseen by humans. But in our time, one of AI’s challenges is that the skills and resources required to create it are not inevitably paired with the philosophical perspective to understand its broader implications.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“In our period, new technology has been developed, but remains in need of a guiding philosophy.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“The irony is that even as digitization is making an increasing amount of information available, it is diminishing the space required for deep, concentrated thought.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“The railroads that delivered goods to market were the same that delivered soldiers to battle — but they had no destructive potential. Nuclear technologies are often dual-use and may generate tremendous destructive capacity, but their complicated infrastructure enables relatively secure governmental control. A hunting rifle may be in widespread use and possess both military and civilian applications, but its limited capacity prevents its wielder from inflicting destruction on a strategic level.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“The dilemma of the AI age will be different: its defining technology will be widely acquired, mastered, and employed. The achievement of mutual strategic restraint — or even achieving a common definition of restraint — will be more difficult than ever before, both conceptually and practically. The management of nuclear weapons, the endeavor of half a century, remains incomplete and fragmentary. Yet the challenge of assessing the nuclear balance was comparatively straightforward. Warheads could be counted, and their yields were known. Conversely, the capabilities of AI are not fixed; they are dynamic. Unlike nuclear weapons, AIs are hard to track: once trained, they may be copied easily and run on relatively small machines. And detecting their presence or verifying their absence is difficult or impossible with the present technology. In this age, deterrence will likely arise from complexity — from the multiplicity of vectors through which an AI‑enabled attack is able to travel and from the speed of potential AI responses.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“The irony is that even as digitization is making an increasing amount of information available, it is diminishing the space required for deep, concentrated thought. Today’s near-constant stream of media increases the cost, and thus decreases the frequency, of contemplation. Algorithms promote what seizes attention in response to the human desire for stimulation—and what seizes attention is often the dramatic, the surprising, and the emotional. Whether an individual can find space in this environment for careful thought is one matter. Another is that the now-dominant forms of communication are non-conducive to the promotion of tempered reasoning.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“In the 1990s, a set of renegade researchers set aside many of the earlier era’s assumptions, shifting their focus to machine learning. While machine learning dated to the 1950s, new advances enabled practical applications. The methods that have worked best in practice extract patterns from large datasets using neural networks. In philosophical terms, AI’s pioneers had turned from the early Enlightenment’s focus on reducing the world to mechanistic rules to constructing approximations of reality. To identify an image of a cat, they realized, a machine had to “learn” a range of visual representations of cats by observing the animal in various contexts. To enable machine learning, what mattered was the overlap between various representations of a thing, not its ideal—in philosophical terms, Wittgenstein, not Plato. The modern field of machine learning—of programs that learn through experience—was born.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“But even in such a scenario, many users, if given the choice, would rather not be limited to a network platform that hosts only their compatriots and the software offerings and content they produce. Instead, the dynamics of positive network effects will tend to support only a handful of participants who are leading the technology and the market for their particular product or service.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“Later, in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first, this thinking informed theories of AI and machine learning. Such theories posited that AI’s potential lay partly in its ability to scan large data sets to learn types and patterns—e.g., groupings of words often found together, or features most often present in an image when that image was of a cat—and then to make sense of reality by identifying networks of similarities and likenesses with what the AI already knew. Even if AI would never know something in the way a human mind could, an accumulation of matches with the patterns of reality could approximate and sometimes exceed the performance of human perception and reason.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“AI’s mysteries may not yield a single answer or proceed straightforwardly in one direction, but they should prompt us to ask questions. When intangible software acquires logical capabilities and, as a result, assumes social roles once considered exclusively human (paired with those never experienced by humans), we must ask ourselves: How will AI’s evolution affect human perception, cognition, and interaction?”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“will increasingly appear to humans as a fellow “being” experiencing and knowing the world — a combination of tool, pet, and mind.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“example, in airline and automotive emergencies, should an AI copilot defer to a human? Or the other way around?”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“As the cost of opting out of the digital domain increases, its ability to affect human thought — to convince, to steer, to divert — grows.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“AI can also be used defensively, locating and repairing flaws before they are exploited. But since the attacker can choose the target, AI gives the party on offense an inherent if not insuperable advantage.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“nuclear war between major powers would involve irreversible decisions and unique risks for victor, vanquished, and bystanders alike.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“Unique among security strategies (at least until now), nuclear deterrence rests on a series of untestable abstractions:”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“a bluff taken seriously could prove a more useful deterrent than a bona fide threat that was ignored.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“Viewed through the lens of deterrence, seeming weakness could have the same consequences as an actual deficiency;”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“What degree of inferiority would remain meaningful in a crisis in which each side used its capabilities to the fullest?”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“Rather than clear outcomes, however, we are more likely to arrive at a series of dilemmas with imperfect answers.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“With data and computing requirements limiting the development of more advanced AI, devising training methods that use less data and less computer power is a critical frontier.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“App developers often rush programs to market, correcting flaws in real time, while aerospace companies do the opposite: test their jets religiously before a single customer ever sets foot”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“Developing professional certification, compliance monitoring, and oversight programs for AI — and the auditing expertise their execution will require — will be a crucial societal project.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“AI’s brittleness is a reflection of the shallowness of what it learns.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“Aided by the advancement and increasing use of AI, the human mind is accessing new vistas, bringing previously unattainable goals within sight. These include models with which to predict and mitigate natural disasters, deeper knowledge of mathematics, and fuller understanding of the universe and the reality in which it resides. But these and other possibilities are being purchased  —   largely without fanfare  —   by altering the human relationship with reason and reality. This is a revolution for which existing philosophical concepts and societal institutions leave us largely unprepared.”
― Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI and Our Human Future

“When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom. Yet the internet inundates users with the opinions of thousands, even millions, of other users, depriving them of the solitude required for sustained reflection that, historically, has led to the development of convictions.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“can the need for philosophy be met by humans assisted by AIs, which interpret and thus understand the world differently?”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

“But information is not self-explanatory; it is context-dependent.”
― Henry Kissinger, The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future