I am not sure how to explain it, except that – truth matters to us.
Moore’s Law of Mad Science: Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.
Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them.
You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.
The police officer who puts their life on the line with no superpowers, no X-Ray vision, no super-strength, no ability to fly, and above all no invulnerability to bullets, reveals far greater virtue than Superman – who is only a mere superhero.
There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don’t care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don’t have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!
The people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills.
By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.
There is light in the world, and it is us!
Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals, they are passed milestones on our road; and the most important milestone is the hero yet to come.
When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.
You cannot rationalize what is not rational to begin with – as if lying were called truthization. There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument – you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.
If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.
The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.
To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.
I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.
Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change; you can’t do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY, you’ve got to let yourself do better than other people!
And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed.