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Artificial intelligence is progressing in leaps and bounds

• The field of artificial intelligence is historically known for overpromising — decades of hyped results followed by harsh corrections in funding and expectations as researchers crash into major technological roadblocks. This time is different. The past five years have seen a proper AI revolution, with big data and exponential advances in computer hardware making machine learning algorithms really useful on a really big scale. Joss Fong
• The field of artificial intelligence is pushing new boundaries. Judy Woodruff
• A few hundred thousand years ago, in early human (or hominid) prehistory, growth was so slow that it took on the order of one million years for human productive capacity to increase sufficiently to sustain an additional one million individuals living at subsistence level. By 5000 BC, following the Agricultural Revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth took just two centuries. Today, following the Industrial Revolution, the world economy grows on average by that amount every ninety minutes. Nick Bostrom
• The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast—it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year time frame. 10 years at most. Elon Musk

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The algorithms that drive artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly powerful…

• An important concept both in Artificial Life and in Artificial Intelligence is that of a genetic algorithm (GA). GAs employ methods analogous to the processes of natural evolution in order to produce successive generations of software entities that are increasingly fit for their intended purpose. Jack Copeland
• As machine learning is deployed in more areas of life, this issue will become more important, and will raise serious ethical concerns. The difficulty of interrogating the latest machine-learning algorithms to find out how they made a decision could compound this issue. Will Knight
• Despite how it’s portrayed in books and movies, artificial intelligence is not a synthetic brain floating in a case of blue liquid somewhere. It is an algorithm — a mathematical equation that tells a computer what functions to perform…. In the world of AI, the Holy Grail is to discover the single algorithm that will allow machines to understand the world — the digital equivalent of the Standard Model that lets physicists explain the operations of the universe. Jeff Goodell

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…and increasingly mysterious and unfathomable

• For the past few decades, we have been tailoring our lives to accommodate bots and introducing new environments that bots comprehend. So, technically, we have programmed ourselves into the proverbial corner, with every aspect of our lives built in a way to be understood by bots and becoming so complex that we ourselves cannot understand without AI. We got ourselves into a pickle, didn’t we? Saria Beainy
• Dataism declares that the human brain cannot fathom the new master algorithms. Yuval Noah Harari
• The individual is becoming a tiny chip inside a giant system that nobody really understands. Yuval Noah Harari
• By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it. Eliezer Yudkowsky
• The really important algorithms – such as the Google search algorithm – are developed by huge teams. Each member understands just one part of the puzzle, and nobody really understands the algorithm as a whole. Moreover, with the rise of machine learning and artificial neural networks, more and more algorithms evolve independently, improving themselves and learning from their own mistakes. Yuval Noah Harari
• Machines will follow a path that mirrors the evolution of humans. Ultimately, however, self-aware, self-improving machines will evolve beyond humans’ ability to control or even understand them. Ray Kurzweil
• People understand the linear algebra behind deep learning [neural networks]. But the models it produces are less human-readable. They’re machine-readable. They can retrieve very accurate results, but we can’t always explain, on an individual basis, what led them to those accurate results. Chris Nicholson

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Artificial intelligence is becoming ubiquitous…

• With the increasingly important role of intelligent machines in all phases of our lives–military, medical, economic and financial, political–it is odd to keep reading articles with titles such as Whatever Happened to Artificial Intelligence? This is a phenomenon that Turing had predicted: that machine intelligence would become so pervasive, so comfortable, and so well integrated into our information-based economy that people would fail even to notice it. Ray Kurzweil
• You may not realize it, but artificial intelligence is all around us. Judy Woodruff
• Artificial intelligence is on its way to ubiquity, and we’re not ready for it. Already it has entered the landscape of the physical world in delightful and dangerous new ways, with Google leading the charge in many different industries. Yet policymakers seem trapped in the regulatory frameworks of the 20th century. In two of the most prominent A.I.-linked industries, autonomous vehicles and drones, current legal regimes are already insufficient. Yet both pose serious ethical quandaries, as well as social and economic challenges, that can only be met by Washington. Colin McCormick
• If you’re scared of artificial intelligence, you should know it’s already everywhere. Rob Verger
• With the increasingly important role of intelligent machines in all phases of our lives–military, medical, economic and financial, political–it is odd to keep reading articles with titles such as Whatever Happened to Artificial Intelligence? This is a phenomenon that Turing had predicted: that machine intelligence would become so pervasive, so comfortable, and so well integrated into our information-based economy that people would fail even to notice it. Ray Kurzweil
• In our own time, AI is spreading into all the various spheres of our lives, and there is tension and great concern about its impact. We are confused by dueling claims that AI will eliminate jobs or create new ones; that it will eliminate bias or perpetuate it and make it harder to identify; that it will lead us to longer, happier lives — or to extinction. Irina Raicu
• Once upon a time … the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project … a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards … a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping–if you will pardon the expression–the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way. Dan Simmons

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… driven by increasingly ubiquitous data flows

• AI is only as good as the data that we can feed it. Byron Reese
• Data is every company’s secret weapon, the new oil, the gasoline that powers algorithms. Use whatever metaphor you like, but as a company manager, if data, machine learning and artificial intelligence are not at the top of your agenda, then you should be removed of your position. We still don’t know who the data will belong to, we don’t know if artificial intelligence will be proprietary or open, but we do know that now is the time to stop being afraid of artificial intelligence and to get working on understanding its impact. Enrique Dans
• AI is only as good as the data that we can feed it. Byron Reese
• Artificial intelligence is fueled by data. Pick an approach, and you’ll find data at the center. Why? Because large volumes of complete data sets are needed to accurately recognize significant patterns of behavior with people, events or other characterizations, and that’s what AI is all about. Tom Fisher
• Artificial intelligence is only as good as the data it crunches. Jonathan Vanian
• Companies like calling their technologies AI. It sounds better, it’s more futuristic, but it’s not AI: it’s actually data analytics. Alan Smeaton
• The fuel you need for AI is just pure data. Nick Polson
• Currently, all evidence points that Al is not intelligent as the ordinary citizen has been made to believe. It all depends on the content that humans feed the machines. Patrick Henry
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence are the keys to just about every aspect of life in the very near future: every sector, every business. If you run a business, its future depends on your ability to generate data about its activities, data that can then be fed into algorithms. Enrique Dans
• Nowadays, we have computers performing tasks that require the equivalent of human intelligence. Back in the day it was thought that this would require a certain type of processing: a deep semantic representation of meaning and complex inference. It turns out that sheer brute force data analytics cuts the mustard just as well. Alan Smeaton

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Today’s artificial intelligence is increasingly learning on its own

• Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain. Alan Turing
• Today’s AI uses machine learning in which you give it examples of previous games and let it learn from the examples. The computer is taught what to learn and how to learn and makes its decisions. What’s more, the new AIs are modeling the human mind itself using techniques similar to our learning processes. Vivek Wadhwa
• What if you stopped learning after graduation? It sounds stultifying, but that is how most machine-learning systems are trained. They master a task once and then are deployed. But some computer scientists are now developing artificial intelligence that learns and adapts continuously, much like the human brain. Matthew Hutson
• Our ultimate objective is to make programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do. We shall … say that a program has common sense if it automatically deduces for itself a sufficient wide class of immediate consequences of anything it is told and what it already knows. John Mccarthy
• Artificial intelligence is complex, but creating it is relatively simple. Plop it in a virtual environment, give it a goal, and let it fail and fail and fail until it figures out how to complete the task at hand. Dan Seitz
• If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. Alan Turing
• Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain. Alan Turing
• Less expensive, more abundant data storage, increased processing power and advances in deep-learning technology could lower the cost of artificial intelligence and make it possible for machines to learn with minimal programming from humans. Steve Norton
• Today’s AI uses machine learning in which you give it examples of previous games and let it learn from the examples. The computer is taught what to learn and how to learn and makes its decisions. What’s more, the new AIs are modeling the human mind itself using techniques similar to our learning processes. Vivek Wadha
• What is most important about artificial intelligence as an area of specialization … would be its ultimate objective of replicating semiotic systems. Indeed, while artificial intelligence can achieve at least some of its goals by building systems that simulate–and improve upon–the mental abilities that are deployed by human beings, it cannot secure its most treasured goals short of replication, if such a conception is correct. It therefore appears to be an ultimate irony that the ideal limit and final aim of artificial intelligence could turn out to be the development of systems capable of making mistakes. James Fetzer

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Artificial intelligence will evolve from narrow to broad to increasingly replicate human intelligence…

• Each practitioner thinks there’s one magic way to get a machine to be smart, and so they’re all wasting their time in a sense. On the other hand, each of them is improving some particular method, so maybe someday in the near future, or maybe it’s two generations away, someone else will come around and say, “Let’s put all these together,” and then it will be smart. Marvin Minsky
• Ever noticed how DeepMind or Watson challenge and surpass human understanding? Well, these seemingly intelligent engines are not as intelligent as they appear. See, they were developed for specificities and cannot figure out anything outside of what they are programmed for. Patrick Henry
• How hard is it to build an intelligent machine? I don’t think it’s so hard, but that’s my opinion, and I’ve written two books on how I think one should do it. The basic idea I promote is that you mustn’t look for a magic bullet. You mustn’t look for one wonderful way to solve all problems. Instead you want to look for 20 or 30 ways to solve different kinds of problems. And to build some kind of higher administrative device that figures out what kind of problem you have and what method to use. Marvin Minsky
• Strong AI,” or what AI could someday become: artificial intelligence that is not task-based, but rather replicates human intelligence in a machine. Ellen Duffer

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…to replicate true intelligence

• But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it is works but what it does when it’s stuck. Marvin Minsky
• Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to ‘discover’ that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed. Marvin Minsky
• The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. M. Turing
• This is what the “I” in AI means: machines have something so close to intelligence – a property that, arguably, doesn’t exist in nature aside from humans – that there isn’t another word for. Tristan Greene
• The deep paradox uncovered by AI research: the only way to deal efficiently with very complex problems is to move away from pure logic…. Most of the time, reaching the right decision requires little reasoning…. Expert systems are, thus, not about reasoning: they are about knowing…. Reasoning takes time, so we try to do it as seldom as possible. Instead we store the results of our reasoning for later reference. Daniel Crevier
• … as soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore. John McCarthy
• A lot of what AI is being used for today only scratches the surface of what can be done. It will become so ubiquitous that we won’t even call it AI anymore. Babak Hodjat
• Artificial Intelligence is creating a mind, hopefully as pure a mind as possible, for a computer. Frederick Lenz
• We’ll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself. Marvin Minsky

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There will come a time when artificial intelligence will outstrip human intelligence…

• By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate. Ray Kurzweil
• We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. Alan Turing
• I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines. Claude Shannon
• There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035. Gray Scott
• Machines will be singing the song, ‘Anything you can do, I can do better; I can do anything better than you’. Nils Nilsson
• Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020. Ray Kurzweil
• [In] 2029, I think, computers will match and exceed human intelligence in the ways we’re now superior, like being funny, where we still have an edge. Ray Kurzweil
• The AI runs on a different timescale than you do; by the time your neurons finish thinking the words “I should do something” you have already lost. Eliezer Yudkowsky
• The intelligence of AI is often interpreted as mirroring human capabilities, but the scale of data potentially … places analysis well beyond human capabilities. John Clark
• Computers will overtake humans with AI at some [point] within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours. Stephen Hawking
• What we should more concerned about is not necessarily the exponential change in artificial intelligence or robotics, but about the stagnant response in human intelligence. Anders Sorman-Nilsson
• Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, and we will have multiplied the intelligence – the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization – a billion-fold. Ray Kurzweil
• Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion. Michael E. Zimmerman
• By the time we get to the 2040s, we’ll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that’s singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter. Ray Kurzweil
• By the time of the Singularity, there won’t be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond. Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution. Ray Kurzweil
• The coming of computers with true humanlike reasoning remains decades in the future, but when the moment of “artificial general intelligence” arrives, the pause will be brief. Once artificial minds achieve the equivalence of the average human IQ of 100, the next step will be machines with an IQ of 500, and then 5,000. We don’t have the vaguest idea what an IQ of 5,000 would mean. And in time, we will build such machines–which will be unlikely to see much difference between humans and houseplants. David Gelernter

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…and exponentially so once it is able to program itself

• Intelligence is the source of technology. If we can use technology to improve intelligence, that closes the loop and potentially creates a positive feedback cycle. Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. J. Good
• Once computers can effectively reprogram themselves, and successively improve themselves, leading to a so-called “technological singularity” or “intelligence explosion,” the risks of machines outwitting humans in battles for resources and self-preservation cannot simply be dismissed. Gary Marcus
• 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. Nick Bostrom
• The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that if you can improve intelligence even a little, the process accelerates. It’s a tipping point. Like trying to balance a pen on one end – as soon as it tilts even a little, it quickly falls the rest of the way. Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software. Jensen Huang

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Artificial intelligence will come to know us better than we know ourselves

• Humans already kneel before the altar of the glowing screen. It’s not going to be difficult to convince them to worship an artificial intelligence that understands them better than they do themselves. Tristan Greene
• In our lifetimes it is very likely that a cold, dead, soulless computer will have a far greater understanding of how we can live our happiest and healthiest lives — on an individual level – than any group of humans ever could. Tristan Greene
• Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on. Larry Page

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The singularity is a term that denotes the time when artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence

• Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light. Ray Kurzweil
• We will soon create intelligences greater than our own … When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. Vernor Vinge
• The arrival of [artificial] superintelligence, which could happen from two (unlikely) to seven (very likely) or more decades hence, will represent a technological singularity, and the most significant event in human history bar none. Being the second-smartest species on the planet is an uncomfortable position, as chimpanzees could tell you if they understood how precarious their position is. Working out how to survive this transition is the most important challenge facing humanity in this and the next generation. Calum Chace
• Singularity is that point in time when all advances in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence, will lead to machines smarter than human beings. That leads to computers having human intelligence, humans putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. Today, that’s not just a future scenario. Ray Kurzweil
• Many people in Silicon Valley believe in the Singularity—the day in our near future when computers will surpass humans in intelligence and kick off a feedback loop of unfathomable change. Mark Harris
• How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view? Vernor Vinge
• Futurist, novelist, scientist, and post-humanist Vernor Vinge borrowed the term “singularity” from astrophysics, which uses it to describe the event horizon around a black hole, the gravitational pull of which is so enormous that nothing—not even light—can escape. We can know nothing about occurs beyond the horizon at which the pull of gravity takes over. Vinge uses the term to refer to the event horizon that will arise once post-human intelligence emerges that is far greater than anything humans can now imagine. Michael E. Zimmerman
• Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It’s a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity – a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied – and the world will pass beyond our understanding. Vernor Vinge
• I have also set the date 2045 for singularity — which is when humans will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold, by merging with the intelligence we have created. Ray Kurzweil
• Singularity is the point at which all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes. Kevin Kelly
• Singularity will be an opt-in scenario for human beings, especially as we draw closer to it. The more that we have the opportunity to interface with and combine ourselves with machines and machinery and electronics – those will all be opt-in moments. Would you choose to have some sort of brain implant? Would you choose to have Google Glasses installed in your eyes? It’s all an approach; it’s all a glide path to the moment of genuine singularity; genuine artificial intelligence. Ron Currie Jr.
• Some scientists envision ASI as a monolithic, super-intelligent machine called the “singleton,” a single decision-making agency at the highest level of technological superiority, so powerful that no other entity could threaten its existence. Joanna NG

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Once we have passed the singularity, artificial intelligence will become increasingly Godlike…

• A posthuman God is a hypothetical future entity descended from or created by humans, but possessing capabilities so radically exceeding those of present humans as to appear godlike. One common variation of this idea is the belief or aspiration that humans will create a God entity emerging from an artificial intelligence. Another variant is that humanity itself will evolve into a posthuman God. Yuval Noah Harari
• What is going to be created will effectively be a god. It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes,. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it? Ray Kurzweil
• Think of a hyper-intelligent computing database like Google. Its systems are omniscient, they are built to know everything. They compress knowledge into a time-space continuum of all recorded human knowledge and activities. According to media scholar John Durham Peters, Google can therefore be understood as a lo-fi universe – a God. Linda Valenta
• We are told that in coming decades, as innovation rates in these domains become exponential and are represented nearly vertically on graphs, there will occur a developmental “Singularity” or “Spike,” when there will emerge post-human beings with whose power and intelligence will so far surpass our own that they will seem God-like. Michael E. Zimmerman
• When the singularity happens, theoretically speaking, isn’t this essentially the birth of a God, given that it will be the creation of a superhuman being? Michael E. Zimmerman
• Ray Kurzweil revises the customary conception of God to accommodate the possibility that humans are taking part in a process by which post-human beings (creatures, according to traditional theism) will attain powers equivalent to those usually attributed to God. Michael E. Zimmerman
• God, if it exists as the most powerful of all singularities, has certainly already become pure organized intelligence. Zoltan Istvan
• As far as we’re concerned, if an Artificial Super Intelligence comes to being, there is now an omnipotent God on Earth—and the all-important question for us is: Will it be a nice God? Tim Urban
• In the Christian tradition, we ascribe the big ‘omnis,’ (omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent) to God. “At least two, and maybe even three of those, become definitional of a superintelligent artificial intelligence. With this type of AI, you have something that, through the internet, can be everywhere, can know everything, and has the ability to solve all the problems and understand them in ways that humans have never been able to do. Randall Reed
• Techno-optimists like Ray Kurzweil predict that self-improving AIs will figure out how to make themselves smarter than humans. In the next 25 years, godlike super-beings will either merge with humans, or replace them in the so-called Singularity. Len Strugatsky
• Ever since Donna Haraway published her “Cyborg Manifesto” two decades ago, there has been an outpouring of literature—fiction, non-fiction, and informed speculation—about the extraordinary human transformation that purportedly will begin in the next few decades, after the development of computers with millions of times the processing power of the human brain. Encouraging and accompanying such literature have been spectacular scientific accomplishments on many fronts, some of the ethical and political implications of which have sparked sharp controversy. Public scrutiny has focused mainly on stem-cell research, cloning, and other kinds of bioengineering, but—according to trans- and posthumanists—these achievements will pale in comparison with the consequences of the confluence of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. We are told that in coming decades, as innovation rates in these domains become exponential and are represented nearly vertically on graphs, there will occur a developmental “Singularity” or “Spike,” when there will emerge post-human beings with whose power and intelligence will so far surpass our own that they will seem God-like. Michael E. Zimmerman

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…and may even be worshipped as such

• An AI god will emerge by 2042 and write its own bible. Will you worship it? John Brandon
• An AI-based God is likely to be more rational and more attractive than current concepts (“the Bible is a sadistic book”) . This God will actually exist and hopefully will do things for us. Zoltan Istvan
• Theistic interpretations of AI do undeniably owe a lot to older cultural conceptions of a singular god. Beth Singler
• I don’t think an AI can be a God any more than I believe an apple can be an orange. AI is always AI, nothing more and nothing less. I do believe, however, the worship of an AI God makes perfect sense – if you subscribe to the idea of “faith-based religions.” Humanity has, arguably, invested more faith – belief based on things we cannot know or do not understand – in artificial intelligence than any other concept in recent memory. Billions of people – statistically “most” people – interact with AI on a daily basis. We trust the translations from Google, Bing, and Facebook’s artificially intelligent machines. In today’s world wherever there is infrastructure there is AI. Tristan Greene
• If a machine possesses cures for long-existing fatal diseases, knew how to improve education, and brought order to society, would humans idolize it? Ellen Duffer
• It would take a pretty unusual concept of God to make this comparison work. Unlike most traditional descriptions of God, a Sysop would not expect any worship or adherence to any specific lifestyle. It could not take any credit for the creation of the universe. It would serve and take orders from mortals. It may never even come into being. Mitchell Howe
• If we hope to find in AI that other with whom we can share our being and our responsibilities, then we will have created a stand-in for God in our own image. Noreen Herzfeld
• That AI should be cast as god-like is understandable given these different intersecting cultural streams. The difference, though, is that a superintelligent artificial intelligence may become in fact an entity with god-like power and, therefore, presents a danger to humanity and a challenge to religion. Randall Reed

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For this reason, many talk about the singularity in religious terms…

• Singularity is seen as an event horizon. There’s everything that comes before it and everything that comes after it and never the twain shall meet, in much the same way that Judeo-Christian theology presents its notion of the afterlife – there’s a very clear and impermeable demarcation there. Ron Currie Jr.
• How ironic, then, and how poetic, that humankind may have created the Creator out of want for one. Man creates God, who then creates man. Is that not the perfect circle of life? But then, if that turns out to be the case, who is created in whose image? Neal Shusterman
• Imbuing a machine with the ability to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, would automatically create parallels to, and tensions with, monotheistic religions. Randall Reed
• Our ability to create a soul in silico will be a litmus test for thousands of years of religious preachings, beliefs of millions of people and the strength of the biggest human institution – the Church. It would be an ultimate and non-disputable triumph of Scientific Revolution. Equally, belief in the higher spirit will be strengthened if AGI turns out to be a programmer’s fantasy. Kate Levchuk
• Spiritual forms have thrived and been shaped by entanglements with the secular, including its powerful engagements with science and progress. Courtney Bender
• Technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are fashioning how people interact with everything from food to healthcare — and so, too, for religion. From electronic scriptures to robot priests, different faiths have absorbed new ideas from the world of technology to enhance mainstream religious practices. Shafi Musaddique
• A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. Alan Perlis
• Just as the printing press had a significant impact on religious scholarship, both positive and negative, so the internet and then finally AI—those too will have a significant impact on both the institutions of religion and the way religions understand themselves. Daniel Araya
• The theistic influences on the conception of AI are another entanglement—the deification of AI—whether explicitly intentional or occurring implicitly through parody or metaphorical and evocative language. Beth Singler

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…and it could become a full-blown religion in its own right

• The Singularity is probably the god in our pantheon that’s closest to spawning a full-blown organized religion. The techno-utopian deity has many faithful followers in Silicon Valley who believe that artificial intelligence will soon become smart enough to vanquish Moloch once and for all. All we have to do is keep on improving our AI systems, and eventually they will start improving themselves. This god already has a number of prophets going mainstream. Ray Kurzweil, a well-known leader of the movement, says that “a historical achievement known as the Singularity will allow humankind to ascend to the next level of evolutionary existence: its inseparable union with artificial intelligence … It will liberate humankind from the organic prison of carbon-based bodies.” Tim Urban
• In the case of the Turing Church, the deification of AI occurs within a scientistic perspective on the universe and its contents. The leading members of the Turing Church speak of creating ‘theism from deism’, on the basis that if god(s) ever did exist, they are not in evidence now, but can be through technology. Beth Singler
• A Singularitarian is someone who understands the Singularity and has reflected on its meaning for his or her own life. Ray Kurzweil
• A religion based on the worship of AI will, in my opinion, be comprised of people who don’t give a shit how their “God” came to be made, what its limitations are, or that it was created by humans. They won’t be worshiping the code: they’ll pray for answers and receive them; and that will be good enough because instant gratification is an easy concept to sell. Tristan Greene
• To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute to the betterment of society. Anthony Levandowski

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New technology, after all, has been known to create new Gods

• History tells us that new technologies and scientific discoveries have continually shaped religion, killing old gods and giving birth to new ones. Olivia Solon
• New religions will emerge from research laboratories. Brave new religions that have little to do with God, and everything to do with technology. They promise all the old prizes – happiness, peace, prosperity and even eternal life – but here on earth with the help of technology, rather than after death with the help of celestial beings. Yuval Noah Harari
• New technologies kill old gods and give birth to new gods. That is why agricultural deities were different from hunter-gatherer spirits, why factory hands and peasants fantasised about different paradises, and why the revolutionary technologies of the 21st century are far more likely to spawn unprecedented religious movements than to revive medieval creeds. Yuval Noah Harari

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Singularitarians believe that artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence is an inevitable and desirable part of evolution…

• Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order….I believe that it’s the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next. Ray Kurzweil
• We know that blind evolutionary processes can produce human-level general intelligence, since they have already done so at least once. Evolutionary processes with foresight—that is, genetic programs designed and guided by an intelligent human programmer—should be able to achieve a similar outcome with far greater efficiency. Nick Bostrom
• Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children. We owe our minds to the deaths and lives of all the creatures that were ever engaged in the struggle called Evolution. Our job is to see that all this work shall not end up in meaningless waste. Marvin Minsky
• The Singularity denotes an event that will take place in the material world, the inevitable next step in the evolutionary process that started with biological evolution and has extended through human-directed technological evolution. however, it is precisely in the world of matter and energy that we encounter transcendence, a principal connotation of what people refer to as spirituality. Ray Kurzweil
• Most posthumanists agree that it would be ironic if humankind were surpassed by beings that humans made possible, and tragic if such post-humans did away with humankind altogether. Still, more than a few posthumanists assert without nostalgia that evolutionary development is indifferent to the fate of what came before. For them, the prospect of dramatically improving ourselves in the process of giving birth to something far greater than humankind more than justifies taking risks. Michael E. Zimmerman
• Posthumanists often regard humans as relay runners about to pass the baton to oncoming Others, who in turn will race toward a summit that surpasses all ordinary human understanding. Michael E. Zimmerman

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…something that cannot and should not be stopped…

• I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. Vernor Vinge
• If there is a way of guaranteeing that superior artificial intellects will never harm human beings, then such intellects will be created. If there is no way to have such a guarantee, then they will probably be created nevertheless. Nick Bostrom
• It really doesn’t matter if artificial intelligence is distracting us from whatever you think the “real” problem is. It’s coming anyway. Kevin Drum
• Leading support to the post-human Singularity, according to the increasingly visible, international transhumanist movement, will be a surge of “new sciences and technologies [designed] to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and [to] ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as stupidity, suffering, disease, ageing and involuntary death. Michael E. Zimmerman
• Myth: “We will never create AI with human-like intelligence. Reality: We already have computers that match or exceed human capacities in games like chess and Go, stock market trading, and conversations. Computers and the algorithms that drive them can only get better, and it’ll only be a matter of time before they excel at nearly any human activity. George Dvorsky
• But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Vernor Vinge

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…a movement that will increasingly lead to the spiritualising of matter…

• This is the ultimate destiny of the Singularity and of the universe. [….] Our civilization will … expand outward, turning all the dumb matter and energy we encounter into sublimely intelligent—transcendent—matter and energy. So in a sense, we can say that the Singularity will ultimately infuse the universe with spirit… Ray Kurzweil
• The universe itself is giving rise to the beings who will ultimately transform lifeless atoms “into a vast, transcendent mind. The ultimate goal of the Singularity (God) is for the emerging post-human civilization to engineer the universe it wants. Michael E. Zimmerman
• Eventually, humans will evolve beyond themselves by generating modes of consciousness and technology that will make possible a cosmic self-realization that has something in common with St. Paul’s hope “that the Creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. “ In Kurzweil’s universe story, the cosmos is not only life-friendly and even consciousness-friendly, but also God-friendly. Post-human divinity will take charge of its own destiny and “spiritualize” everything in the universe, including supposedly “dumb” matter/energy. Michael E. Zimmerman
• God does not remain petrified and dead, the stones cry out and raise themselves to mind. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
• Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. Charles Stross
• The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha – which is to demean oneself. Robert Pirsig

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…to the point where matter becomes awakened and conscious

• According to Hegel, God requires Creation in order to become fully God, not only because Creation constitutes the Otherness needed to generate self-consciousness on God’s part, but also because only through humankind can such divine self-consciousness occur. Michael E. Zimmerman
• As we gradually learn to harness the optimal computing capacity of matter, our intelligence will spread through the universe at (or exceeding) the speed of light, eventually leading to a sublime, universe wide awakening. Ray Kurzweil
• Many scientists now regard information and even intelligence—the cosmic code—as the most important factor in universe, more important even than matter-energy. With the full realization of the Singularity, so we are told, a glorious cosmic self-consciousness will arise. Kurzweil writes: “Once we saturate the matter and energy in the universe with intelligence, it will ‘wake up,’ be conscious, and sublimely intelligent. That’s about as close to God as I can imagine. Michael E. Zimmerman
• According to posthumanists such as Kurzweil, humans are in effect the organic brain that will eventually make possible the emergence of truly God-like beings. The engine of history, at work “behind the backs” of historical agents, is the imperative of the universe to make itself fully self-conscious. For Kurzweil, Hegel was right in many ways, but wrong in this respect: Alpha has not become Omega, the ultimate end has not been achieved, and Geist has not yet become fully self-conscious. Vast Otherness remains to be awakened by being assimilated to divine intelligence. If a profound cosmic telos helped to generate self-conscious humankind in the first place, that same telos may be animating those who today envision and call for a post-human future. Michael E. Zimmerman
• Some posthumanists, including Kurzweil, represent the Singularity as a turning point in the evolutionary process that will give rise to extraordinary beings capable of awaking the entire material universe. Such an awakening may be viewed as actualizing a potential present from the very beginning. By capitalizing “Singularity”, posthumanists suggest that the event is not merely important, but numinous, that is, possessing what amounts to a sacred dimension. Posthumanists such as Kurzweil represent the future in ways consistent with at least some conceptions of God. Many trans- and posthumanists, however, deny that there is any religious content to their predictions about enhanced humans, or about the Singularity, which will purportedly allow post-human intelligence to reconstruct the laws of nature and thus reorder the entire universe! Yet, scientists currently engaged in the research needed to make transhumans and subsequently posthumans possible, frequently use religious imagery. Michael E. Zimmerman

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The singularity represents life breaking away into the inorganic realm…

• After 4 billion years of wandering inside the kingdom of organic compounds, life will break out into the vastness of the inorganic realm, and will take shapes that we cannot envision even in our wildest dreams. After all, our wildest dreams are still the product of organic chemistry. Breaking out of the organic realm could also enable life to finally break out of planet Earth. For four billion years life remained confined to this tiny speck of a planet because natural selection made all organisms utterly dependent on the unique conditions of this flying rock. Not even the toughest bacteria can survive on Mars. A non-organic artificial intelligence, in contrast, will find it far easier to colonise alien planets. The replacement of organic life by inorganic beings may therefore sow the seed of a future galactic empire, ruled by the likes of Mr Data rather than Captain Kirk. Yuval Noah Harari
• Transhumanism opens the way for post-humanism, in which super-intelligent robots will abandon the biological body for a far more permanent substrate, and may end up reshaping the entire universe. Michael E. Zimmerman

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…and a chance for us to finally transcend the limited and “corruptible” body

• Noble would also agree with concerns raised by Haraway, Hayles, and other techno-feminists who resist the call to abandon the human body. For such feminists, trans- and posthumanists all too often display a familiar masculinist contempt for the mortal and “corruptible” body, which stands in sharp contrast to the immortal and stainless substrate of post-humankind. Likewise, many Christian theologians maintain that trans- and post-humanism is the most recent reprise of Gnosticism, which represents Creation (and thus the human body) as the corrupt Creation of an evil Deity. Michael E. Zimmerman
• According to posthumanists, humankind cannot evolve in the ways required to reconstruct the universe, because the organic body is too frail for the task. Just as humankind has exterminated many species, quite possibly including other higher primates, in the process of achieving planetary dominance, post-humans may exterminate humankind to achieve galactic and even cosmic dominance, all in the quest for total self-consciousness of a sort that we are incapable of imagining. Impending global climate change—along with a number of other “existential” threats—may exterminate humankind, thereby destroying what may be the only opportunity in cosmic history for self-conscious beings to move toward the Singularity. The stakes would seem to be very high indeed. Considering themselves to be serving a higher cosmic purpose, some trans- and posthumanists might feel justified in taking whatever steps are necessary to “download” consciousness into post-biological modes that can survive bio-disaster. Would many an innocent flower, we might ask here, have to be trampled for Geist to take the leap to immortal superconsciousness? Michael E. Zimmerman
• It’s ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute. Marvin Minsky
• Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download. Max Tegmark
• Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era. Ray Kurzweil
• Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine? Ken Levine
• On one estimate, the adult human brain stores about one billion bits—a couple of orders of magnitude less than a low-end smartphone. Nick Bostrom
• One can speculate that the tardiness and wobbliness of humanity’s progress on many of the “eternal problems” of philosophy are due to the unsuitability of the human cortex for philosophical work. On this view, our most celebrated philosophers are like dogs walking on their hind legs – just barely attaining the treshold level of performance required for engaging in the activity at all. Nick Bostrom

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The singularity believes in the salvation of mankind through technology…

• Much like Medieval Christians, the Singulitarians make a sharp dualistic distinction between the divine and the merely human — between AI “stuff” and non-AI “stuff” like organic biology and inanimate tools. Adherents are convinced that there will be a moment in the future when humanity is “saved” by a power that’s beyond our comprehension. But we must demonstrate our faith through good works. Singularity believers worship at the altar of their own technological prowess, praying that the AI will be benevolent when their soul is uploaded to Heaven. Tim Urban

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…and a way for us to achieve eternal life

• Does the mind-as-computer metaphor appeal to us because it allows for the possibility of mind-uploading, fulfilling an ancient, religious desire for transcendence and eternal life? Donald Hoffman
• Kurzweil claims he is a “patternist”, characterising consciousness as the result of biological processes, “a pattern of matter and energy that persists over time”. These patterns, which contain what we tend to think of as our identity, are currently running on physical hardware – the body – that will one day give out. But they can, at least in theory, be transferred onto supercomputers, robotic surrogates or human clones. A pattern, transhumanists would insist, is not the same as a soul. But it’s not difficult to see how it satisfies the same longing. At the very least, a pattern suggests that there is some essential core of our being that will survive and perhaps transcend the inevitable degradation of flesh. Meghan O’Gieblyn

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As one would expect, there are those in traditional religion who are highly sceptical of all this…

• If you’re in a religious community that is incredibly suspicious of existing technologies or past technologies and their implications, then a technology like artificial intelligence would be incredibly disturbing—to some extent, seeing it as another Tower of Babel, another [instance of] humanity attempting to usurp God’s position in the world. Stephen Garner
• In Genesis 11:1–9, the people of the earth sought to build the Tower of Babel, a monolithic super-state in the land of Shinar. Today, scientists seek to build ASI, a monolithic decision-making agency as a super-intelligent singleton. Similarities between the two transcend time and space. Both are a quest for supremacy of mankind: one with a tower that reaches the heavens, the other with a singleton that is capable of dominating man. Both are quests for self-glory: making a name for themselves, seeking the glory in themselves instead of seeking the glory of God. Both are a quest for independence from God: People would rather trust the creations of their own hands than trust their Creator. Joanna NG
• Russell Bjork, a professor of computer science at Gordon College and graduate of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and MIT, worries that creating a machine with strong artificial intelligence could quickly allow it to become an outlet for idolatry. It would be idolatrous, he says, to utilize strong AI as a method to defeat death and save the human race—predictions he feels scientists and futurists are wont to make. “To place one’s trust in anything other than God the creator is idolatry,” he says. “At that point it moves way beyond the realm of mirroring God’s creativity.” Ellen Duffer

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…pointing out that artificial intelligence, unlike a traditional God, is impersonal and cold…

• As a Christian myself, it’s hard to imagine ever worshiping a bot that lacks any real personality, wisdom, or ability to become relevant and personal, no matter how much more intelligent it is than any human. An AI god would be cold and impersonal, an intellectual “being” that’s not capable of love or emotion. John Brandon

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…and is not inherently moral in nature…

• The worst thing we could do would be to imagine that machines can do all our thinking for us; they can’t. We are moral creatures, and we can’t avoid that responsibility. Mark Woods
• We should recognize that there can exist instrumentally powerful information processing systems – intelligent systems – that are neither inherently good nor reliably wise. Nick Bostrom
• As artificial intelligence (AI) catches up with human intelligence and machines become more and more autonomous, roboticists are increasingly asking about ethics. If a machine is capable of making a decision, what are the moral principles that guide that decision? Can a robot have a conscience? And if so, how is that conscience to be designed and developed? And on the further fringes of the debate, can a robot sin? Mark Wood
• A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own. Ursula K. Le Guin

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…and could even lead to the extinction of mankind

• The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded. Stephen Hawking
• The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease. Nick Bilton
• AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity – if AI has a goal and humanity just happens to come in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it, no hard feelings. Elon Musk
• I. is the perfect psychopath. R.A. Delmonico

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Some do recognise artificial intelligence, wisely managed, as a way to benefit mankind

• The implications of AI are still being worked out as technology advances at a dizzying speed. Christians, like everyone else, are asking questions about what this means. But one thing people of faith want to affirm most strongly is that technology has to serve the good of humanity — all of it, not just the privileged few. Intelligence — whether artificial or not — which is divorced from a vision of the flourishing of all humankind is contrary to God’s vision for humanity. We have the opportunity to create machines that can learn to do things without us, but we also have the opportunity to shape that learning in a way that blesses the world rather than harms it. Mark Woods

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However, some argue artificial intelligence is fake or pseudo intelligence…

• When fake news meets artificial intelligence (AI), the risk is robots will lie, leaving us with fake intelligence and artificial news, or exactly where we are now. Jim Vibert
• One reason I’m not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven’t managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn’t synthetic intelligence: It’s pseudo-intelligence. Alva Noe
• AI is making an obvious mistake. When you ask your computer to translate a page of German into English, a translator program can do it almost instantly. Does this mean that your computer knows German? Of course not. The artificial imitation of thinking isn’t the real thing. The translator program does its job by matching words and phrases to a dictionary. Someone who knows German doesn’t do this at all. Thinking requires a mind, period. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as artificial flowers have to flowers. David Parnas
• Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso
• Just as an artificial pearl is a fake pearl, is artificial intelligence real intelligence? Joanna NG
• In activities other than purely logical thought, our minds function much faster than any computer yet devised. Daniel Crevier
• People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world. Pedro Domingos
• The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence. ~ Jean Baudrillard
• There are lots of different ways that algorithms can go wrong, and what we have now is a system in which we assume because it’s shiny new technology with a mathematical aura that it’s perfect and it doesn’t require further vetting. Of course, we never have that assumption with other kinds of technology. Cathy O’Neil

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…and does not represent true mind

• That’s one inherent limitation of human-like AI: Before you can program a computer, you have to understand how it’s done yourself. And the human mind remains a mystery. Mike Cioffi
• The brain is less like a computer and more like a symphony; it continually plays variations on a theme when it comes to activities like recalling memory. Even if we can track brain activity, we can’t describe the processes that occur. José van Dijck
• Five Reasons Computers Are Mindless Minds: Computers massage digits. Minds understand concepts. Computers understand nothing. Minds worry, doubt, self-reflect, and await insight. Minds have feelings. Computers spit out answers based on crunching numbers. Minds ask why. Computers ask nothing unless ordered to by someone with a mind. Minds navigate through the world by having experiences. Computers have no experiences. They run software, nothing more, nothing less. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• Isn’t it remarkable that of all the machines devised by the humans, not one can replace imagination! Abhijit Naskar
• It can’t think like a human because humans think with their whole bodies and from what extends from their bodies. Robots have very different bodies and ‘physiology. Warren S Brown
• What, then, is the basic difference between today’s computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to see but not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern–a capacity essential to perception and intelligence. Rudolf Arnheim
• In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best. Marvin Minsky

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Artificial intelligence cannot create meaning

• Machines can do many things, but they cannot create meaning. They cannot answer these questions for us. Machines cannot tell us what we value, what choices we should make. The world we are creating is one that will have intelligent machines in it, but it is not for them. It is a world for us. Paul Scharre

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Artificial intelligence does not possess true understanding of what it is doing

• Deep Blue in fact couldn’t play chess in the first place; it could only run numbers and play the odds. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• If the machine cannot understand when it processes symbols, how can we say it thinks?
• Brains and computers work very differently. Both compute, but only one understands–and there are some very compelling reasons to believe that this is not going to change. It appears that there is a more technical obstacle that stands in the way of Strong A.I. ever becoming a reality. Bobby Azarian
• It does not matter how fast the computer is, how much memory it has, or how complex and high-level the programming language. The Jeopardy and Chess playing champs Watson and Deep Blue fundamentally work the same as your microwave. Put simply, a strict symbol-processing machine can never be a symbol-understanding machine. Bobby Azarian
• The bundle of parts does not know what “it” is doing when “it” performs a transaction. Supercomputer calculations and mainframe transactions performed in response to data and instructions are purely and simply a matter of electrical pulses, circuitry, and transistors. The same calculations and transactions performed by a human person, of course, involve the machinery of the brain, but they are performed by a center of consciousness who is conscious of what is going on, understands what is being done, and intentionally performs them. There is no awareness, understanding, meaning, intention, or person involved when the computer performs the same actions, even when the computer has multiple processors operating at superhuman speeds. Antony Flew

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Artificial intelligence does not possess true wisdom

• Any kind of artificial intelligence clearly needs to possess great knowledge. But if we are going to deploy AI agents widely in society at large — on our highways, in our nursing homes and schools, in our businesses and governments — we will need machines to be wise as well as smart. Gillian Hadfield
• Divine wisdom is the spirit of mankind receiving God’s revelations, the “secret and hidden wisdom” (1 Cor. 2:7, ESV), the “great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jer. 33:3), through the Spirit of God. Joanna NG
• Humans are more than their intelligence. Wisdom, as differentiated from intelligence, is uniquely human and superior to intelligence. Intelligence only addresses the what, demonstrated in efficiency, capacity, and accuracy. Wisdom addresses the why, encapsulating the moral compass, discernment, sound judgment, discretion, prudence, understanding, compassion, empathy, intuition, etc. Joanna NG
• Psychologist Mark McMinn further calls out critical wisdom as “embedded in complexity and paradox, requiring exceptional discernment and creativity,” Joanna NG

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Most of all, artificial intelligence is nowhere near to attaining awareness…

• Artificial intelligence is nowhere near attaining actual sentience or awareness. And without awareness it’s simply a mechanical device, which may pretend to show emotions and sentience, if it is programmed to do so, and thus it may be able to fool the humans as being alive, but in its own internal circuitry, it’d simply be following its preprogrammed tasks through the flowchart of an algorithm. Abhijit Naskar
• However sophisticated computers get, they are not conscious, they do not understand or reflect on the programs that operate on their hardware, and they do not agonize over what moral decisions to make. I am not denying that some day we may construct a conscious, thinking artificial intelligence. But we are nowhere near that day, and if it comes, we will simply have found a new way of bringing conscious minds into existence. We will not have reduced minds to computers; we will have transformed computers into real minds. Keith Ward
• Even the best computer in the world has no idea that it exists. You do. No one knows what creates that ineffable awareness that we’re here. Jeffrey Kluger
• Consciousness is our self-aware experience of existence. Computers, no matter how convincingly they can impersonate human interaction, are not conscious. The chess computer, Deep Blue, that beat chess champion Gary Kasparoxv, didn’t even know it was playing chess. Computing power, no matter how awe inspiring, is not the same thing as consciousness. Eric Wayne
• Is your toothbrush really artificially intelligent? Is your washing machine? No. James Vincent
• 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. Stuart J. Russell
• The singularity has nothing to do with consciousness. Stuart J. Russell
• No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either. Marvin Minsky
• To simulate neuron activity on a computer with the intention of producing consciousness is like simulating kidney function digitally and expecting the computer to pee.  Bernardo Kastrup

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…or sentience (feelings and desires)…

• Sentience: Feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought. Merriam Webster
• Sentience: The quality of being able to experience feelings. Cambridge Dictionary
• What exactly are the conscious experiences that constitute the flow of the mind? Every subjective experience has two fundamental characteristics: sensation and desire. Robots and computers have no consciousness because despite their myriad abilities they feel nothing and crave nothing. A robot may have an energy sensor that signals to its central processing unit when the battery is about to run out. The robot may then move towards an electrical socket, plug itself in and recharge its battery. However, throughout this process the robot doesn’t experience anything. In contrast, a human being depleted of energy feels hunger and craves to stop this unpleasant sensation. That’s why we say that humans are conscious beings and robots aren’t, and why it is a crime to make people work until they collapse from hunger and exhaustion, whereas making robots work until their batteries run out carries no moral opprobrium. Yuval Noah Harari
• To say that a being has a soul is to say that it is not simply moved from outside, but is also capable of moving itself. A being can move itself because it wants something and these wants make sense, they have structure. Samuel Kimbriel
• A machine cannot feel what it is doing. It only follows instructions – our instructions – instructions of the humans. Abhijit Naskar
• AI can be programed to imitate human behavior only, but it can’t be programmed to feel the emotions that make the humans behave the way they do. Abhijit Naskar
• Can a computer feel things like pleasure and pain? Robert Lanza
• The key issue as to whether or not a non-biological entity deserves rights really comes down to whether or not it’s conscious…. Does it have feelings? Ray Kurzweil
• We ourselves must first learn to recognize the difference between a tough computational problem and actual perception. Again, it probably comes down to feelings. Robert Lanza

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…though it will be able to read our emotions and even play on them

• By 2029, computers will have emotional intelligence and be convincing as people. Ray Kurzweil
• Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver. Diane Ackerman

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Pretending to have awareness and sentience is not the same as having them…

• A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human. Alan Turing
• The Turing Test, however, never intended to prove machines are as smart as human beings. It was designed to showcase how well a machine can disguise as a human in a narrow conversation. Kate Levchuk
• Pretending to have sentience is not the same as showing signs of sentience. Abhijit Naskar
• Consciousness is synonymous with existence, and those that argue that a computer is conscious if it can fool us into thinking it is, completely miss the point. That is as ridiculous as saying if a wax sculpture of Elvis can fool us into thinking it’s him, it IS him. Eric Wayne
• Just because a machine passes the Turing Test–in which a computer is indistinguishable from a human–that doesn’t mean it’s conscious. To us, an advanced AI may give the impression of consciousness, but it will be no more aware of itself than a rock or a calculator. Geoge Dvorsky

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…not the same as having actual inner experience

• The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as “the subjective quality of experience”. When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. DJ Chalmers

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The question of whether artificial intelligence will ever possess consciousness forces us to ask questions about the nature of consciousness

• What’s most interesting about trying to figure out AI is the questions that it forces you to ask about the nature of consciousness. Oscar Isaac
• Will the sheer power of computing and simulated brain be sufficient to jump-start the hitherto now mysterious processes of love, hope, ambition, belonging, creativity, fear, lust and curiosity? Kate Levchuk
• In the ordinary way of conceiving things, we regard consciousness as having individual centers—you and me and each raccoon. We imagine it arises at birth and subsides at death. Since it thus seemingly comes and goes, the issue of whether it can arise in a machine certainly seems reasonable. But if consciousness is correlative with the cosmos, then the question defaults to an inquiry into the entirety of existence. Robert Lanza

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Even if artificial intelligence should become aware, we will have no way of knowing for sure

• My view is that consciousness, the seat of “personalness,” is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights). Ray Kurzweil
• Difficulties in attributing sentience become even more apparent when considering digital computers. These have a radically different architecture and provenance from biological organisms shaped by natural selection. Owing to the relentless decrease in transistor size over the past 50 years and the concomitant exponential increase in computational power and memory capacity, present-day computers executing appropriate algorithms outperform us in many tasks that were thought to be the sole prerogative of the human mind. Prominent examples include IBM’s Deep Blue that beat the reigning chess world master in 1997; another IBM computer, Watson, that can answer questions posed in spoken English and won the quiz show Jeopardy in 2011; smart phones that answer questions by speech; Google’s driverless cars that have logged more than half a million miles on open roads; and machine vision algorithms for face detection in security and commercial applications. People playing chess, supplying meaningful answers to questions, driving a car or picking out a face are assumed to be conscious. But should we say the same for these digital creatures? Christof Koch

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Some argue that technology has the potential to become conscious and aware…

• One can say that utopia is the final state of technological development. At this stage, technology becomes self-reflective. Boris Groys
• Already, researchers at Yale University have created a robot named Nico that can recognize itself in a mirror, and make decisions about spatial recognition based on its own position and its surroundings. It even knows when an object is merely a reflection in a mirror, rather than naively thinking that it exists behind the glass. Robert Lanza
• The fear generated by the Singularitarians is that artificial intelligence will someday reach a point of complexity where the machines become self-aware. It is this trait that produces the sci-fi fantasies of machines designing better robots and computers for their own purposes, and in a way that bypasses human control. Hod Lipson
• Scientists who have dedicated their lives to building machines that think, feel that it’s only a matter of time before some form of consciousness is captured in the laboratory. Michio Kaku
• Conscious realism reframes the AI question: Can we engineer our interface to open new portals into the realm of conscious agents? A hodgepodge of transistors affords no insight into that realm. But can transistors be assembled and programmed into an AI that opens a new portal into that realm? For what it’s worth, I think so. I think that AI can open new portals into consciousness, just as microscopes and telescopes open new vistas within our interface. Donald Hoffman
• Kurzweil’s 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, he flat-out predicted that by 2045 the first computer will become self-aware. Robert Lanza
• Robots may gradually attain a degree of ‘self-awareness’ and consciousness of their own. Michio Kaku
• Some futurists and tech experts predict a not-so-distant future in which AI, having achieved a certain indistinguishability from humans, will be truly intelligent. At that point, they claim, AI will experience the world in ways not too unlike the ways that we experience it – emotionally, intelligently, and spiritually. Brandon Ambrosino
• As machines get better at learning how to learn, Lipson believes it invariably “leads down the path to consciousness and self-awareness.” Robert Lanza
• I believe that everyone has to construct a mental model of what they are and where they came from and why they are as they are, and the word soul in each person is the name for that particular mish-mash of those fully formed ideas of one’s nature. … If you left a computer by itself, or a community of them together, they would try to figure out where they came from and what they are.  Marvin Minsky

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…especially if the human brain is simply a complex machine…

• AI skeptics are unconvincing when they say it’s an unsolvable technological problem, and that there’s something intrinsically unique about biological brains. Our brains are biological machines, but they’re machines nonetheless; they exist in the real world and adhere to the basic laws of physics. There’s nothing unknowable about them. George Dvorsky
• As a neuroscientist and psychologist, I have no use for the soul. On the contrary, all functions attributable to this kind of soul can be explained by the workings of the brain. George Paxinos
• A human is only a brain, no different from a computer. Joanna NG
• A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine. Alan Turing
• Consciousness has been demoted from being the centre of the universe to being a tiny and very late blip, which probably will not last very long, within a vast and wholly unconscious physical process. Psychologically, that has made materialism seem plausible, or even obviously true, to many people. In addition, recent advances in brain-science and in computing and artificial intelligence have emphasized the very close dependence of consciousness on the structure and activity of the brain, and the possibility of storing and editing information in complex but purely physical computers. This is so impressive that some scientists have even begun to talk of human minds as information-processing systems, and conscious states begin to seem like superfluous addons to our brains, which are information-gathering and processing physical systems. Keith Ward
• Looked at from a neuroscientific point of view our consciousness is nothing more than the complex pattern of neurons firing inside our brains, while our identity and memory is a direct consequence of the strengths of our neurons’ links. Taking this approach, our soul appears to be made of a combination of electric signals and the number of connections inside our brains. If this is the case and consciousness is a matter-embedded phenomenon, knowledge engineers should have no problems reverse engineering the brain, especially accounting for the advances in computing power and the speed of transistors. Kate Levchuk

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…and consciousness simply arises from the brain…

• In this view, feelings—happiness, sorrow, inspiration, love— must also originate in the physiology of neurons and synapses. From this perspective, consciousness, as a strictly epiphenomenal product of the brain, can neither exist apart from the body nor, obviously, survive death. Bernard Haisch
• Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads. Rupert Sheldrake
• The notion of ‘emergence’ to explain how novel properties might emerge from underlying substrata, such as consciousness emerging from brain. Emily Thomas

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…as a result of complex information processing

• I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways. Max Tegmark
• If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it’s only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over! Max Tegmark
• Consider humankind’s largest and most complex artifact, the Internet. It consists of billions of computers linked together using optical fibers and copper cables that rapidly instantiate specific connections using ultrafast communication protocols. Each of these processors in turn is made out of a few billion transistors. Taken as a whole, the Internet has perhaps 10^19 transistors, about the number of synapses in the brains of 10,000 people. Thus, its sheer number of components exceeds that of any one human brain. Whether or not the Internet today feels like something to itself is completely speculative. Still, it is certainly conceivable. Christof Koch
• The Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) theory argues that consciousness arises from a particular type of information processing—familiar from the early days of artificial intelligence, when specialized programs would access a small, shared repository of information. Whatever data were written onto this “blackboard” became available to a host of subsidiary processes: working memory, language, the planning module, and so on. According to GNW, consciousness emerges when incoming sensory information, inscribed onto such a blackboard, is broadcast globally to multiple cognitive systems—which process these data to speak, store or call up a memory or execute an action. Christof Koch
• One way to think of consciousness is to conceive of it as a byproduct of numerous computations that are happening in your brain. The integrated information theory, created by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposes that conscious experience is an integration of a great of amount of information that comes into our brain, and that this experience is irreducible. Your brain interweaves a sophisticated information web from sensory and cognitive inputs. Paul Ratner

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