Quotes That Make Me Think

Machines & Minds

“The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.”
— Edsger W. Dijkstra

“If a superior alien civilisation sent us a message saying, ‘We’ll arrive in a few decades,’ would we just reply, ‘OK, call us when you get here — we’ll leave the lights on’? Probably not — but this is more or less what is happening with AI. Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues.”
— Stephen Hawking, The Independent, 2014

“Robots will make our future better. If they don’t kill us.”

“I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”
— Ken Jennings, his Final Jeopardy! answer against IBM’s Watson, 2011

On Thinking

“Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”
— Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

“Cevabını bilmediğin sorular sormaktan çekinme.”
(Don’t be afraid to ask questions you don’t know the answer to.)

“Reality is for people who lack imagination.”

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
— Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek, 1980

On Failing & Learning

“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”
— Thomas J. Watson

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
— Otto von Bismarck

“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”
— Douglas Adams

On Being

“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.”
— Kurt Cobain

“The morning breeze has things to tell you. Do not go back to sleep.”
— Rumi

On Markets & Power

“When I see a bubble, I buy it, because that’s how I make money.”
— George Soros

“State is a shitty monopoly.”

"Can you put a price on peace?"
— Dave Mustaine (in Peace Sells...but Who's Buying?)

And Finally

“Quotations are an overfit machine.”