I used to say that if you gave me a trillion dollars to build a sentient or conscious machine I would give it back. I could not honestly say I knew how it works.

The singularity has nothing to do with consciousness.

When I read philosophy or neuroscience papers about consciousness, I don't get the sense we're any closer to understanding it than we were 50 years ago.

Its really important to understand the difference between sentience and consciousness, which are important for human beings.

No one has a clue how to build a conscious machine, at all. We have less clue about how to do that than we have about build a faster-than-light spaceship.

Everything we have of value as human beings - as a civilization - is the result of our intelligence.

It's unlikely that machines would spontaneously decide they didn't like people, or that they had goals in opposition to those of human beings.

I expect that people are going to feel differently about that once they're aware that AI systems can watch through a camera and can, in some sense, understand what it's seeing.

Google or other search engines are examples of AI, and relatively simple AI, but they're still AI. That plus an awful lot of hardware to make it work fast enough.

Some PhD physicists write software or work for hedge funds, but physics still has a problem with having very smart people but not enough opportunities.

It's very hard to predict what kind of uses we'd make of assistants that could read and understand all the information the human race has ever generated. It could be really transformational.

Well, in this world of basic stereotyping, give a guy a big nose and some weird hair and he is capable of anything.

In the light, we find the light of life.

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

When everything gets turned upside down, it only leads to better quality stuff.

I've always been an avid reader. Everyone in my family read a lot. Considering we were from a little town, we were pretty literate.

You couldn't take two roads. And once you were on one, there was no going back.

When you're amongst people doing well it's so gratifying and spurs you to just keep investing in your job.

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.

The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways.