Albert Efimoff

“These “Singularians” have gone so far as to establish their own educational institution. Singularity University, located in Silicon Valley, offers unaccredited graduate-level programs focused on the study of exponential technology and counts Google, Genentech, Cisco, and Autodesk among its corporate sponsors.”
― Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

“It may take seconds for a human sitting in the driver’s seat, possibly distracted by an email or worse, to return to “situational awareness” and safely resume control of the car. Indeed the Google researchers may have already come up against the limits to autonomous driving. There is currently a growing consensus that the “handoff” problem—returning manual control of an autonomous car to a human in the event of an emergency—may not actually be a solvable one.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“What Homestead-Miami also made clear was that there are two separate paths forward in defining the approaching world of humans and robots, one moving toward the man-machine symbiosis that J. C. R. Licklider had espoused and another in which machines will increasingly supplant humans. Just as Norbert Wiener realized at the onset of the computer and robotics age, one of the future possibilities will be bleak for humans. The way out of that cul-de-sac will be to follow in Terry Winograd’s footsteps by placing the human in the center of the design.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

“work. At the same time, Zakos attended conferences, making assertions that when companies ran A-B testing that compared the way the Cybertwins responded to text-based questions to the way humans in call centers responded to text-based questions, the Cybertwins outperformed the humans in customer satisfaction. They boasted that when they deployed a commercial system on the website of National Australia Bank, the country’s largest bank, more than 90 percent of visitors to the site believed that they were interacting with a human rather than a software program.”
― John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots