It’s unlikely that any of those natural hazards will do us in within the next 100 years if we’ve already survived 100,000. By contrast, we are introducing, through human activity, entirely new types of dangers by developing powerful new technologies. We have no record of surviving those.

The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development-and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion.

We would want the solution to the safety problem before somebody figures out the solution to the AI problem.

We should not be confident in our ability to keep a super-intelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever.

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

There are some problems that technology can't solve.

Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.

Human nature is a work in progress.

When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.