barbara cathalinat

“Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing computer, was a sole entity, and not a team of self-improving ASIs, but the feeling of going up against it is instructive. Two grandmasters said the same thing: “It’s like a wall coming at you.” IBM’s Jeopardy! champion, Watson, was a team of AIs—to answer every question it performed this AI force multiplier trick, conducting searches in parallel before assigning a probability to each answer.”
― James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

“above. If we accept as true only the things we see happen with our own eyes in our own lifetime, we’d have to regard all of human history as dubious.”
― Jerry A. Coyne, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

“Like genetic algorithms, ANNs are “black box” systems. That is, the inputs—the network weights and neuron activations—are transparent. And what they output is understandable. But what happens in between? Nobody understands. The output of “black box” artificial intelligence tools can’t ever be predicted. So they can never be truly and verifiably “safe.”
― James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

“But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the “threat” and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. In fact, the competitive advantage—economic, military, even artistic—of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will. —Vernor Vinge, The Coming Technological Singularity, 1993”
― James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era