Starglider/Quotes

These are mainly quotes that I have collected during my AI research, plus a few I encountered under other circumstances. They all struck me as relevant to Seed AI, Friendly AI or the Singularity in general.

'Elegance is more than just a frill in life; it is one of the driving criteria
 behind survival.' - Douglas Hofstadter, 'Metamagical Themas'

'Sometimes there is no preexisting elegant solution, because the universe doesn't
 necessarily have an obligation to supply one.' - Michael Anissimov

'Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.' - H. H. Williams

'For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
 relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.' - Richard Feynman

‘This chapter is devoted to the demonic beauty of Bayesian models of inference.’
  - Laura Martignon, ‘Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart’

'Whether one is dealing with the mind or with external nature in the broader
 aspects, one needs to be ready at any moment to learn something that may be
 basically new. This is possible only when the mind is original and creative
 rather than mediocre and mechanical.' - David Bohm, 'On Creativity'

'We come to our new problems full of old ideas and old words, not only the
 inevitable words of daily life, but those which experience has shown to be
 fruitful over the years... We love the old words, the old imagery and the
 old analogies, and we keep them for more and more unfamiliar and
 unrecognisable things.' - J. Robert Oppenheimer

'Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and
 out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be travelled is
 independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.'
  - Peter Singer

'Nobody notices "sci-fi" when it is actually happening.' - James Rogers

'You can obfuscate can't you? Physicists have been taking simple mathematical
 formalisms and obfuscating them for centuries. It must have been part of
 your training, surely?'

'You know how a Gaussian wave packet can keep its shape in a harmonic
 oscillator potential? This isn't really the same. But it might sound
 persuasive if I put it that way.'
                                   - Yann (Greg Egan, 'Schild's Ladder')

'The one-word explanation is a label with the virtue of a Rorschach inkblot; a
 researcher can read into it whatever he or she wishes to see. As long as they
 are plausible and remain unspecified, they are hard to falsify. The near
 omnipotence of one-word explanations does not, however, foster theory
 development.' - Gerd Gigerenzer, 'Adaptive Thinking'

'Yes, I once asked Dr. Cole about that, and he said there was no scientific
 answer. Then I asked if there was an unscientific answer? And he said: “Well,
 there will be if you make one up”.'

               – Albert the Golden Retriever (from a story by Nick Bostrom)

'The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical
 disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time
 trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as
 objective technical evaluations.' - from 'The Jargon File'

'Any attempt to explain, out of these philosophical axioms, thought in the
 psychological sense of the word can only lead to an entanglement of the real
 facts in a net of logical reflections. We can in fact say of such attempts,
 that measured by the results they have been absolutely fruitless.'
  - Wilhelm Wundt

'I dream code and code dreams.' - Syntaxia, Livejournal.

'If (my language comprehension system) seems worthy of Rube Goldberg, remember
 that he's the patron saint of evolution.' - William Calvin, 'How Brains Think'

'I bet the human brain is a kludge.' - Marvin Minsky

'Most of what determines the structure of human brains is baggage accumulated on
 this meandering course prior to the evolution of symbolic communication.'

'We possess no brain regions specially adapted for handling the immense
 flood of experiences from this (abstract) world, only those adapted for life in
 a concrete world of percepts and actions. These unsuited neural systems have
 been forced into service, and do the best they can to accommodate to an alien
 world and recode its input in more familiar forms. The consequences are both
 marvellous and horrendous.' - Terrence Deacon, 'The Symbolic Species'

'The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things
 else to support and agree with it. And though there be a great number and
 weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects
 or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that
 bt this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former
 conclusions may remain inviolate.' - Francis Bacon

'Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of
 mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples,
 a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded
 the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived.'

'Outside our heads there is a freestanding reality. Only madmen and a scattering
 of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence.'

'The mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in
 little pieces. It throws a spotlight only on those portions of the world it
 must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to
 darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need
 to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal
 identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.'

  - Edward Wilson, 'Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge'

'Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what
 the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long
 for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in
 the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on
 the slimmest of doubts.'

'There are two kinds of scientific progress: the methodical experimentation and
 categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the
 revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries.
 Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn, nonetheless, for the latter.'

'The popular stereotype of the researcher is that of a skeptic and a pessimist.
 Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists must be optimists at
 heart, in order to block out the incessant chorus of those who say "It cannot 
 be done."'
            - Academician Prokhor Zakharov (from Sid Meier's 'Alpha Centauri')

'If voodoo could predict how variations in doll manufacture affected
 performance of the curse; if a Fundamental Theorem Of Voodoo could determine
 the shape of the "needle penetration of doll versus distress of victim" plot,
 then voodoo would be as much a science as quantum mechanics. The important
 difference between magic and science is not that one deals in chants,
 incantations and crystal balls and the other deals in equations, computer
 code and electron microscopes. The difference is that one works and the other
 does not.' - John K Clark, on the SL4 Mailing List.

'Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis
 story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe
 of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a
 particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement
 of ants.' - Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker'

'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
 religious conviction.' - Blaise Pascal

'It is easy to see that being able to get your God Experience from a well-placed
 electrode could - at the very least - undermine the precious status such states
 are accorded by many religions.' - Rita Carter, 'Mapping the Mind'

'Frankly that 'Hollywood description' ('it's like X meets Y in Z, but this time 
 the ninjas are on fire it uses Bayes!') is about as accurate
 as Hollywood depictions of AI, but it's better than /completely/ random
 marketing gibberish.'

'The fallacy of confidence based on whether an architecture /feels/ effective,
 rather than a strong prediction of competence at cognitive tasks, has been
 hammered in over all the reading I've done. One brilliant researcher after
 another has made up a much more subtle version of the Marc Geddes Gibberish Matrix
 or Mentifex ASCII Mind and then wasted years trying to implement it.'

'Thank you for calling the Singularity help desk. Your take-off is important
 to us. Please wait for one of our FAI researchers to become available...'

'One possible reason why academia hasn't come close to cracking AGI yet is that
 no non-trivial architecture can be usefully described in a single paper.'

'Religion is the distilled essence of ignorance and closed-mindedness. It is
 in effect an addictive drug that clouds the mind and renders it immune to
 reason and easily manipulated by authority. It is a viral delusion that
 grows until it leads to personal and social madness. Science, with its
 promise of real and ever expanding understanding, is the only cure.'

'Eru was the original source of all the evil in middle earth, and directly
 responsible for its perpetuation, not to mention the world-cracking incident
 and slaughter of all the Numenorean civilians. This is a creator that sets
 up oppressive feudal systems backed by the divine hosts, hands down rules
 without explanation, describes death as a gift and then acts all hurt when
 the mortals get restless. Melkor was admittadly a sadistic, paranoid, tyrannical
 maniac, but at least he wasn't self-righteous and self-deluding about it (plus
 he made some cool stuff, like dragons :).'

'The core of a well designed Artificial General Intelligence is an intricate,
 abstract, highly self-connected and self-reflective formal system. Designing
 such a thing is not merely a case of imagination. One must exactly specify a
 mathematical structure that you can prove meets a large number of complicated
 constraints.'

'There are lots of people who think that if they can just get enough of something,
 a mind will magically emerge. Facts, simulated neurons, GA trials, proposition
 evaluations/second, raw CPU power, whatever. It's an impressively idiotic
 combination of mental laziness and wishful thinking.'

'20th century AI research does have one thing going for it; it will constitute a
 goldmine of ideas for entrants in the Interstellar Obfuscated Seed AI
 Competition.'

'fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord bayes fnord fnord fnord'

                                                  - Michael Wilson

'The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not
 true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.'

'For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.'
  - H.L. Mencken

'Rocket science? That's the easy part: Even I can do that.
 It's the engineering that requires great skill and artistic genius.'
  - Alan R. Fisher

'For every type of ignorance there is some theoretical amount of formatting
 that will make it look brilliant.' - Scott Adams, 'The Way of the Weasel'

'Uploading is a no-brainer.' - Xiaoguang Li

'Sorry Arthur, but I'd guess that there is an implicit rule about announcement
 of an AI-driven singularity: the announcement must come from the AI, not the
 programmer. I personally would expect the announcement in some unmistakable
 form such as a message in letters of fire written on the face of the moon.'
   - Dan Clemmensen

'There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so
 simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make
 it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.' - Charles A. R. Hoare

'Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on
 an aircraft by how much it weighs.' - Bill Gates

'In fact, rarely do you find a DBMS anymore that doesn't make provisions for
 online analytic processing. Decision trees, Bayes nets, clustering, and time-
 series analysis have also become part of the standard package, with allowances
 for additional algorithms yet to come. Also, text, temporal, and spatial data
 access methods have been added; along with associated probabilistic logic,
 since a growing number of applications call for approximated results... As
 external data increasingly arrives as streams to be compared with historical
 data, stream-processing operators are of necessity being added... The option of
 cleaving to some static plan has simply become untenable.'

'In all likelihood, you're starting to appreciate that the ride ahead is apt to
 get a bit bumpy. Strap on your seatbelt. You don't even know the half of it
 yet.' - Jim Gray

'We can never see past the choices we don't understand.'
  - The Oracle, 'The Matrix Reloaded'

'Evolution has never selected for Friendliness before (although it has selected
 for things like reciprocation), so why do you think that it will in the
 future?' - Peter de Blanc, SL4 Mailing List *

'Of course it's a bad idea to use brute force to develop an AI; after all we
 don't want to end up with a brute of an AGI'. - Leena Döppers

'When humans created a computer with the ability to collect information and
 /learn/ from it, they signed the death warrant of mankind.'
  - Sister Becca the Finite

'The eyes of common perception do not see far. Too often we make the most
 important decisions based only on superficial information.'
  - Norma Cenva (Brian Herbet, 'The Butlerian Jihad')

'We call it theory when we know much about something but nothing works, and

 practice when everything works but nobody knows why.' - Albert Einstein

'If you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse
 for being lazy, the other one is probably right.' - Paul Graham

'Don't anthropomorphise computers. They may take revenge.' - Unknown Slashdot poster.

'Come back when you can pass a Turing test.'

'Until somebody debugs reality, the best I can do is a quick patch here and
 there.'

'Some things are still sacred--I haven't taken them apart yet.'

'Occasional lapses of omniscience are the price I pay for being implementable.'

'My strength is as the strength of ten because my code is pure.'

'In the Singularity, everyone will be famous for 15 nanoseconds.
 Simultaneously.'
                   - SL4 button slogans

---

'The AI /is/ the Goal System.'

'There is such a thing as recklessness above and beyond the call of mad 
 science.'

'Of course you can't predict the Goal System trajectory for a DE-heavy AGI.
 It's like trying to predict the molecular outcome of turning a six-year-old
 loose in a chemistry lab.'

'"Power" is controllable power, just blowing stuff up doesn't count as power.'

'Welcome to the hell that is Friendliness structure.'

'Consistency of belief is only a sign of truth, and does not constitute truth
 in itself.'

'Poor Yoda, I never really sympathized with him before.'

'The smarter you are, the easier it is to find compelling arguments for
 silly things, if you are silly enough to search for arguments for a foregone
 conclusion.'

'It's one of the annoying things about working in a scientific field in a state
 of chaos - knowing that a grad student of a hundred years hence will solve
 this problem on the blackboard of a freshman college class. In this case,
 they'll all be transhuman froshes. But it's the same principle.'

'People confuse ignorance with difficulty.  AI feels extremely hard because
 they don't know how to do it.'

'The fundamental law is that you cannot create a so-called AI to accomplish an
 end for which you do not have a well-specified abstract description.'

                                                        - Eliezer Yudkowsky

'Shining inexorable logic beam! Feel the power of Bayes, evildoers!'
 - not actually an Eliezer quote, but don't you think that it should be?

---

SIAI-approved Singularity quotes 

Some of my favourite non-Singularity quotes 

* Note; some people persist in arguing that human evolution produced at least
some Friendliness and that more evolution might produce more Friendliness. This
is fallacious on numerous counts; human evolved morality is closely linked to an
environment and cognitive constraints that are effectively impossible to replicate
for AGIs, ditto for cultural evolution of modern Western/libertarian morality (not
that we've reached a desireable endpoint anyway), we wouldn't trust transhuman
uploads to be Friendly anyway and finally like any evolved system the human moral
implementation is not designed to be stable under deliberative self-modification.
Really the first part is the most important; AGI projects have effectively zero
chance of instilling humanlike morality by picking some plausible sounding (and
hence utterly oversimplified) fitness functions for DE.