“A calculator is a tool for humans to do math more quickly and accurately than they could ever do by hand; similarly, AI computers are tools for us to perform tasks too difficult or expensive for us to do on our own, such as analyzing large data sets or keeping up to date on medical research.”
― Oren Etzioni
“AI is neither good nor evil. It’s a tool. It’s a technology for us to use.”
― Oren Etzioni
“AI is a tool. The choice about how it gets deployed is ours.”
― Oren Etzioni
“The mechanical loom and the calculator have shown us that technology is both disruptive and filled with opportunities. But it would be hard to find a decent argument that we would have been better off without these inventions.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Cloud computing, smartphones, social media platforms, and Internet of Things devices have already transformed how we communicate, work, shop, and socialize. These technologies gather unprecedented data streams leading to formidable challenges around privacy, profiling, manipulation, and personal safety.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Science is going to be revolutionized by AI assistants.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Life is short. Don’t do the same thing everyone else is doing – that’s such a herd mentality. And don’t do something that’s two percent better than the other person. Do something that changes the world.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Automation has emerged as a bigger threat to American jobs than globalization or immigration combined.”
― Oren Etzioni
“My dream is to achieve AI for the common good.”
― Oren Etzioni
“The best students are ones that are willing to take intellectual risks and challenge conventional thinking.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Sooner or later, the U.S. will face mounting job losses due to advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics.”
― Oren Etzioni
“The only rollercoasters I get on are startups.”
― Oren Etzioni
“I think that there are so many problems that we have as a society that AI can help us address.”
― Oren Etzioni
“To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations.”
― Oren Etzioni
“I’m not a big fan of self-driving cars where there’s no steering wheel or brake pedal. Knowing what I know about computer vision and AI, I’d be pretty uncomfortable with that. But I am a fan of a combined system – one that can brake for you if you fall asleep at the wheel, for example.”
― Oren Etzioni
“The truth is that behind any AI program that works is a huge amount of, A, human ingenuity and, B, blood, sweat and tears. It’s not the kind of thing that suddenly takes off like ‘Her’ or in ‘Ex Machina.’”
― Oren Etzioni
“Scientists need the infrastructure for scientific search to aid their research, and they need it to offer relevancy and ways to separate the wheat from the chaff – the useful from the noise – via AI-enabled algorithms. With AI, such an infrastructure would be able to identify the exact study a scientist needs from the tens of thousands on a topic.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Infrastructure investment in science is an investment in jobs, in health, in economic growth and environmental solutions.”
― Oren Etzioni
“An AI utopia is a place where people have income guaranteed because their machines are working for them. Instead, they focus on activities that they want to do, that are personally meaningful like art or, where human creativity still shines, in science.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Taking new technology and incorporating into how people work and live is not easy.”
― Oren Etzioni
“It’s much more likely that an asteroid will strike the Earth and annihilate life as we know it than AI will turn evil.”
― Oren Etzioni
“I could do a whole talk on the question of is AI dangerous.’ My response is that AI is not going to exterminate us. It’s a tool that’s going to empower us.”
― Oren Etzioni
“What are we going to do as automation increases, as computers get more sophisticated? One thing that people say is we’ll retrain people, right? We’ll take coal miners and turn them into data miners. Of course, we do need to retrain people technically. We need to increase technical literacy, but that’s not going to work for everybody.”
― Oren Etzioni
“The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals and have its own will and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game.”
― Oren Etzioni
“People thrive on genuine connections – not with machines, but with each other. You don’t want a robot taking care of your baby; an ailing elder needs to be loved, to be listened to, fed, and sung to. This is one job category that people are – and will continue to be – best at.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Instead of expecting truck drivers and warehouse workers to rapidly retrain so they can compete with tireless, increasingly capable machines, let’s play to their human strengths and create opportunities for workers as companions and caregivers for our elders, our children, and our special-needs population.”
― Oren Etzioni
“If you step back a little and say we want to do A.I., then you will realize that A.I. needs knowledge, reasoning, and explanation.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Things that are so hard for people, like playing championship-level Go and poker, have turned out to be relatively easy for the machines. Yet at the same time, the things that are easiest for a person – like making sense of what they see in front of them, speaking in their mother tongue – the machines really struggle with.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Understanding of natural language is what sometimes is called ‘AI complete,’ meaning if you can really do that, you can probably solve artificial intelligence.”
― Oren Etzioni
“All these things that we’ve contemplated, whether it’s space travel or solutions to diseases that plague us, Ebola virus, all of these things would be a lot more tractable if the machines are trying to solve these problems.”
― Oren Etzioni
“AI works really well when you couple AI in a raisin bread model. AI is the raisins, but you wrap it in a good user interface and product design, and that’s the bread. If you think about raisin bread, it’s not raisin bread without the raisins. Right? Then it’s just bread, but it’s also not raisin bread without the bread. Then it’s just raisins.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Everybody should do at least one startup sometime in life. It’s such an amazing ride.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning, which is a vibrant research area in artificial intelligence, or AI.”
― Oren Etzioni
“A.I. should not be weaponized, and any A.I. must have an impregnable ‘off switch.’”
― Oren Etzioni
“We don’t want A.I. to engage in cyberbullying, stock manipulation, or terrorist threats; we don’t want the F.B.I. to release A.I. systems that entrap people into committing crimes. We don’t want autonomous vehicles that drive through red lights, or worse, A.I. weapons that violate international treaties.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Because of their exceptional ability to automatically elicit, record, and analyze information, A.I. systems are in a prime position to acquire confidential information.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Even seemingly innocuous housecleaning robots create maps of your home. That is information you want to make sure you control.”
― Oren Etzioni
“In the past, much power and responsibility over life and death was concentrated in the hands of doctors. Now, this ethical burden is increasingly shared by the builders of AI software.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an outsized way?”
― Oren Etzioni
“Our highways and our roads are underutilized because of the allowances we have to make for human drivers.”
― Oren Etzioni
“One of my favorite sayings is, ‘Much have I learned from my teachers, but even more from my friends and even more from my students.’”
― Oren Etzioni
“Netbot was the first comparison shopping company. We realized comparison shopping can be quite tedious if you are driving from one furniture store to another. On the Internet, you can automatically look at a bunch of different stores and see where can you get the best price on a computer or some such thing, so that was the motivation.”
― Oren Etzioni
“There are many valid concerns about AI, from its impact on jobs to its uses in autonomous weapons systems and even to the potential risk of superintelligence.”
― Oren Etzioni
“If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI.”
― Oren Etzioni
“We have an obligation to figure out how to help people cope with the rapidly changing nature of technology.”
― Oren Etzioni
“I’m trying to use AI to make the world a better place. To help scientists. To help us communicate more effectively with machines and collaborate with them.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Machine learning is looking for patterns in data. If you start with racist data, you will end up with even more racist models. This is a real problem.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Driverless cars are a great thing.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Just as our roads and bridges are overdue for investment, so is the infrastructure for scientific research; that is, the body of scientific thought and the tools for searching through it.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Israel is a wonderful place to grow up.”
― Oren Etzioni
“It’s paradoxical that things that are hard for people are easy for the computer, and things that are hard for the computer, any child can understand.”
― Oren Etzioni
“A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice.”
― Oren Etzioni
“A lot of people are scared that machines will take over the world, machines will turn evil: the Hollywood ‘Terminator’ scenario.”
― Oren Etzioni
“The Turing Test was a brilliant idea, but it’s evolved into a competition of chatbots.”
― Oren Etzioni
“I’m not so worried about super-intelligence and ‘Terminator’ scenarios. Frankly I think those are quite farfetched.”
― Oren Etzioni
“I think it’s important for us to have a rule that if a system is really an AI bot, it ought to be labeled as such. ‘AI inside.’ It shouldn’t pretend to be a person. It’s bad enough to have a person calling you and harassing you, or emailing you. What if they’re bots? An army of bots constantly haranguing you – that’s terrible.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Some people have proposed universal basic income, UBI, basically making sure that everybody gets a certain amount of money to live off of. I think that’s a wonderful idea. The problem is, we haven’t been able to guarantee universal healthcare in this country.”
― Oren Etzioni
“I don’t think that all the coal miners – or even more realistically, say, the truck drivers whose jobs may be put out by self-driving cars and trucks – they’re all going to go and become web designers and programmers.”
― Oren Etzioni
“I became interested in AI in high school because I read ‘Goedel, Escher, Bach,’ a book by Douglas Hofstader. He showed how all their work in some ways fit together, and he talked about artificial intelligence. I thought ‘Wow, this is what I want to be doing.’”
― Oren Etzioni
“I like to say I’ve been working on big data for so long, it used to be small data when I started working on it.”
― Oren Etzioni
“I’d like to make a fundamental impact on one of the most exciting, intelligent questions of all time. Can we use software and hardware to build intelligence into a machine? Can that machine help us solve cancer? Can that machine help us solve climate change?”
― Oren Etzioni
“At least inside the city of Seattle, driving is going to be a hobby in 2035. It’s not going to be a mode of commuting the same way hunting is a hobby for some people, but it’s not how most of us get our food.”
― Oren Etzioni
“When there are hiring decisions and promotion decisions to be made, people are hungry for data.”
― Oren Etzioni
“The biggest reason we want autonomous cars is to prevent accidents.”
― Oren Etzioni
“When you have a large amount of data that is labeled so a computer knows what it means, and you have a large amount of computing power, and you’re trying to find patterns in that data, we’ve found that deep learning is unbeatable.”
― Oren Etzioni
“It’s hard for me to speculate about what motivates somebody like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk to talk so extensively about AI. I’d have to guess that talking about black holes gets boring after awhile – it’s a slowly developing topic.”
― Oren Etzioni
“To take intellectual risks is to think about something that can’t be done, that doesn’t make any sense, and go for it responsibly.”
― Oren Etzioni
“Machines and people are both necessary for Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google, and neither is sufficient on its own.”
― Oren Etzioni
“I love sophisticated algorithms that help consumers in a tangible way.”
― Oren Etzioni
“My family is my number one priority.”
― Oren Etzioni
“When you think of driverless cars, there’s a huge potential for these cars to save lives by preventing accidents and by reducing congestion on highways.”
― Oren Etzioni
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