“
Who was she to question the fantastical? She was an invisible naked chick off to steal a magic sword.
”
”
William Kely McClung (Super Ninja: The Sword of Heaven)
“
Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.
”
”
Edgar Rice Burroughs
“
I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don't know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East -- you're as good as dead.
”
”
Elton John
“
You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans? Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course, but it is the best archetype we can actually observe rather than just imagine.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
A Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the color blue.
”
”
Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1))
“
Compassionate Artificial Superintelligence or "AI 5.0", empowers humanity and machine with super-intelligence, super-creativity and super-compassion, which will help humanity and machine to reach new levels of evolution of consciousness.
”
”
Amit Ray (Compassionate Artificial Superintelligence AI 5.0)
“
Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics".
To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile.
Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.
”
”
Paul C.W. Davies
“
And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super-computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.
”
”
Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1))
“
It’s possible that a not-so-smart person who can communicate well can do much better than a super-smart person who can’t communicate well.That is good news because it is much easier to improve your communication skills than your intelligence.
”
”
Kevin Kelly (Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier)
“
But on the question of whether the robots will eventually take over, he {Rodney A. Brooks} says that this will probably not happen, for a variety of reasons. First, no one is going to accidentally build a robot that wants to rule the world. He says that creating a robot that can suddenly take over is like someone accidentally building a 747 jetliner. Plus, there will be plenty of time to stop this from happening. Before someone builds a "super-bad robot," someone has to build a "mildly bad robot," and before that a "not-so-bad robot.
”
”
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
“
I sit back and try to think. I've been discovering, much to my dismay, that I'm not a criminal mastermind or anything. I'm just brute force and my powers in no way include super-intelligence, which kind of pisses me off.
”
”
Kelly Thompson (The Girl Who Would Be King)
“
In short, the advent of super-intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble.
”
”
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
“
It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft (The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft)
“
perhaps that’s what it’s for – self-confidence and courage and energy and peace – perhaps it’s to be used in the world. Perhaps there’s only one thing to do with it: spend it.
I’m always super-conscious of how whenever I go out into the world, whenever I get involved in a relationship, my idea of who I think I am utterly collides with the reality of who I actually am. And I continue to go out even though who I am always comes up short. I always prove myself to be less generous, less charming, less considerate, not as bold or energetic or intelligent or courageous as I imagined in my solitude. And I’m always being insulted, or snubbed, or disappointed. And I’m never in my pyjamas.
And yet, in some way, maybe this is better. Each of us in this room could suffer the pangs of withdrawal and gain the serenity of the non-smoker. We could be demi-gods in our little castles, all alone, but perhaps, at heart, none of us here wants that. Maybe the only cure for self-confidence and courage is humility. Maybe we go out in order to fall short... because we want to learn how to be good at being people... and moreover, because we want to be people.
”
”
Sheila Heti
“
Immortality is our mindset - mindset to transcend disease, aging and death. We live forever by our contribution to the world.
”
”
Amit Ray (Compassionate Artificial Intelligence)
“
With our natural intelligence – super health, happiness and longevity should be the rule instead of the exception.
”
”
Paul Bragg (The Miracle of Fasting - Proven Throughout History)
“
GOD is super intelligent - says GO & DO GOOD things, if not I may pick you as an ODD human & like a honest DOG knows what to do next!
”
”
Ningraj
“
Another piece of Zygo-Gogozizzle 24 ended up landing in a grape vineyard on planet Pinot. The Zygo-Gogozizzle 24 was quickly absorbed into the soil and was subsequently soaked up into the grapes. These grapes, which had until recently been harvested almost to extinction, suddenly became self-aware and super intelligent. They banded together in bunches and rose up to defeat their oppressors. The battle lasted one whole night, but sadly, it ended the next morning when the sun came up. The rebellion shriveled when the poor grapes ran out of juice. Apparently there’s a raisin for everything.
”
”
Dav Pilkey
“
Other personalities are created to handle new traumas, their existence usually occurring one at a time. Each has a singular purpose and is totally focused on that task. The important aspect of the mind's extreme dissociation is that each ego state is totally without knowledge of the other. Because of this, the researchers for the CIA and the Department of Defense believed they could take a personality, train him or her to be a killer and no other ego stares would be aware of the violence that was taking place. The personality running the body would be genuinely unaware of the deaths another personality was causing. Even torture could not expose the with, because the personality experiencing the torture would have no awareness of the information being sought.
Earlier, such knowledge was gained from therapists working with adults who had multiple personalities. The earliest pioneers in the field, such as Dr. Ralph Alison, a psychiatrist then living in Santa Cruz, California, were helping victims of severe early childhood trauma. Because there were no protocols for treatment, the pioneers made careful notes, publishing their discoveries so other therapists would understand how to help these rare cases. By 1965, the information was fairly extensive, including the knowledge that only unusually intelligent children become multiple personalities and that sexual trauma endured by a restrained child under the age of seven is the most common way to induce hysteric dissociation.
”
”
Lynn Hersha (Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country)
“
It’s possible that we are being watched and judged by a race of super-intelligent aliens, who will think badly of us and destroy the Earth if we allow ourselves to be cowed by frivolous lawsuits and don’t turn on the LHC. When possibilities become as remote as what we’re speaking about here, it’s time to take the risks and get on with our lives.
”
”
Sean Carroll (From Eternity to Here)
“
We are entering an age of super-intelligent computers that can take any complex data set—every legal precedent, radiology film, asset price, financial transaction, actuarial table, Facebook like, customer review, résumé bullet, facial expression, and so on—synthesize it, and then perform tasks and make decisions in ways that are as good as or better than the smartest human in the vast majority of cases.
”
”
Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA's MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes. In 1972, then-CIA director Richard Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records. A clerical error spared seven boxes, containing 1738 documents, over 17,000 pages. This archive was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1977, though the names of most people, universities, and hospitals are redacted. The CIA assigned each document a number preceded by "MORI", for "Managament of Officially Released Information", the CIA's automated electronic system at the time of document release. These documents, to be referenced throughout this chapter, are accessible on the Internet (see: abuse-of-power (dot) org/modules/content/index.php?id=31). The United States Senate held a hearing exposing the abuses of MKULTRA, entitled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" (1977).
”
”
Orit Badouk Epstein (Ritual Abuse and Mind Control)
“
Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do. One could say that a man can "inject" an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be "sub critical," i.e. to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are supercritical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals’ minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, "Can a machine be made to be super-critical?
”
”
Alan M. Turing (Computing machinery and intelligence)
“
But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing unction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to say, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of capital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, being disinclined to accredit this greater sagacity to a more competent intelligence, he takes refuge behind the doctrine that it is due to some impenetrable and intangible talent for guessing correctly, some half mystical super sense, some vague (and, in essence, infra-human) instinct.
”
”
H.L. Mencken (In Defense of Women)
“
What if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify - a multiverse, for instance, that continually births universes? Or what if the universe just popped into existence from nothing? Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a super-intelligent alien species?
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry)
“
The gateways to intelligence are always open, 4IQ is the first step to walk in
”
”
Myra Yadav
“
The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice—or not yet—a decided one.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
“
Together we can color our worlds in any way to make our dreams come true.
”
”
Brett Bender (The Coloring Book for the Super Intelligent)
“
Only God was able to create a free creature, and freedom could only arise by the act of creation. Freedom is not the result or product of evolution. Freedom and product are disparate ideas. God does not produce or construct. He creates. We used to say the same for artists, for the artist who constructs does not create a personality but rather a poster of man. A personality cannot be constructed. Maybe sooner or later, during this century or after a million years of continued civilization, man will succeed in constructing an imitation of himself, a kind of robot or monster, something similar to its constructor. This human-looking monster may look very much like man, but one thing is certain: it will never have freedom. Without a divine touch, the result of evolution would not have been man, but rather a developed animal, a super-animal, a creature with a human body and intelligence but without a heart and personality.
”
”
Alija Izetbegović
“
[The little black boy] had seen Tarzan bring down a buck, just as Numa, the lion, might have done... Tibo had shuddered at the sight, but he had thrilled, too, and for the first time there entered his dull, Negroid mind a vague desire to emulate his savage foster parent. But Tibo, the little black boy, lacked the divine spark which had permitted Tarzan, the white boy, to benefit by his training in the ways of the fierce jungle. In imagination he was wanting, and imagination is but another name for super-intelligence.
Imagination it is which builds bridges, and cities, and empires. The beasts know it not, the blacks only a little, while to one in a hundred thousand of earth's dominant race it is given as a gift from heaven that man may not perish from the earth.
”
”
Edgar Rice Burroughs (Jungle Tales of Tarzan (Tarzan #6))
“
I want you to know that all the survivors I interviewed were intelligent people. Many of them were aware of psychological concepts. Some are in the mental healthcare field themselves. They are tender and have a tremendous amount of empathy. Many of them are also highly intuitive and aware of toxic behavior. They pick up when something is off with others. These are not naïve people. You can be super smart, as well as highly aware, and still be fooled by a CN.
”
”
Debbie Mirza (The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse (The Narcissism Series Book 1))
“
It consisted in large part of the engineers and researchers who had built the Heart of Gold – mostly humanoid, but here and there were a few reptiloid atomineers, two or three green sylph-like maximegalaticians, an octopodic physucturalist or two and a Hooloovoo (a Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue). All except the Hooloovoo were resplendent in their multicoloured ceremonial lab coats; the Hooloovoo had been temporarily refracted into a free-standing prism for the occasion.
”
”
Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Complete Trilogy in Five Parts)
“
Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the founders of The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, believes that singularity will lead to an “intelligence explosion” as super-intelligent machines design even more intelligent machines, with each generation repeating this process.
”
”
Peter Singer (Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter)
“
The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice—or not yet—a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
“
The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice - or not yet- a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
“
you say that other species are too dumb to believe in gods but we’re so advanced and technological that we believe in a super natural story of supreme beings that was thought up thousands of years ago by our primitive ancestors who thought that the sun and planets revolved around the earth, who believed that the gods looked down upon us through windows in the heavens, that is to say, stars, so, yes, we’re so advanced that we believe in something that is so clearly fantastical that it’s possible that these ‘dumb animals’ you speak of so derogatively, just might be more intelligent than us.
”
”
Arun D. Ellis (Corpalism)
“
We do know that humans got hit hard by the Toba Super Volcano. We were on the brink of extinction. That caused what population geneticists call a ‘population bottleneck.’ Some researchers believe that this bottleneck caused a small group of humans to evolve, to survive through mutation. These mutations could have led to humanity’s exponential explosion in intelligence. There’s genetic evidence for it. We know that every human being on the planet is directly descended from one man who lived in Africa around sixty thousand years ago—a person we geneticists call Y-Chromosomal Adam. In fact, everyone outside of Africa is descended from a small band of humans, maybe as few as one hundred, that left Africa about 50,000 years ago. Essentially, we’re all members of a small tribe that walked out of Africa after Toba and took over the planet. That tribe was significantly more intelligent than any other hominids in history.
”
”
A.G. Riddle (The Atlantis Gene (The Origin Mystery, #1))
“
Science-fiction movies generally assume that in order to match and surpass human intelligence, computers will have to develop consciousness. But real science tells a different story. There might be several alternative ways leading to super-intelligence, only some of which pass through the straits of consciousness.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do. One could say that a man can “inject” an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there
a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be “sub-critical,” i.e. to correspond in this analogy to piles
of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are supercritical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole “theory” consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals’ minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, “Can a machine be made to be super-critical?
”
”
Alan M. Turing (Computing machinery and intelligence)
“
Since 1945 there has been no Third World War. The development of nuclear weapons may prevent such a catastrophe. In the two World Wars words were one of a variety of weapons in the armory of the belligerent powers. In future, because of the advent of nuclear weapons, words may be the only arms which the super-powers can employ without risking annihilation.
”
”
Charles Roetter (The Art of Psychological Warfare, 1914-1945)
“
Expect an army of Vigil drones, nearly as a many Praesidis guards, a Machim ground detachment of super-soldiers and at least one Inquisitor. Oh, and security barriers everywhere. Possibly some of those mechs we met on Helix Retention, too. You Humans have kicked off a shitstorm of epic proportions.”
Alex spread her arms wide in an exagerrated shrug. “It’s one of our best skills.
”
”
G.S. Jennsen (Rubicon (Aurora Resonant, #2))
“
Many many millions of years ago a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings (whose physical manifestation in their own pandimensional universe is not dissimilar to our own) got so fed up with the constant bickering about the meaning of life which used to interrupt their favorite pastime of Brockian Ultra Cricket (a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away) that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all. And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.
”
”
Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1))
“
[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ]
Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes:
On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...]
It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.
”
”
Colin A. Ross (The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists)
“
If life is a robust phenomenon—and I think it is—then it has originated often in our universe. Similarly, if intelligent life is a robust phenomenon it has also been generated frequently. Why have we not had a chat with ET yet? I think encounters between independent oases of intelligent life are rare because intelligent life is so unstable. Being smart is a fleeting phenomenon. It is self-destructive. Why? Because intelligent life often fails to solve the biggest problem of all: the problem of cooperation.
”
”
M.A. Nowak (SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed)
“
The smartest person to ever walk this Earth in all probability lived and died herding goats on a mountain somewhere, with no way to disseminate their work globally even if they had realised they were super smart and had the means to do something with their abilities.
I am not keen on 'who are the smartest' lists and websites because, as Scott Barry Kaufman points out, the concept of genius privileges the few who had the opportunity to see through and promote their life’s work, while excluding others who may have had equal or greater raw potential but lacked the practical and financial support, and the communication platform that famous names clearly had.
This is why I am keen to develop, through my research work, a definition of genius from a cognitive neuroscience and psychometric point of view, so that whatever we decide that is and how it should be measured, only focuses on clearly measurable factors within the individual’s mind, regardless of their external achievements, eminence, popularity, wealth, public platform etc. In my view this would be both more equitable and more scientific.
”
”
Gwyneth Wesley Rolph
“
TRIAD supernal, both super-God and super-good, Guardian of the Theosophy of Christian men, direct us aright to the super-unknown and super-brilliant and highest summit of the mystic Oracles, where the simple and absolute a!nd changeless mysteries of theology lie hidden within the super-luminous gloom of the silence, revealing hidden things, which in its deepest darkness shines above the most super-brilliant, and in the altogether impalpable and invisible, fills to overflowing the eyeless minds with glories of surpassing beauty. This then be my prayer; but thou, O dear Timothy, by thy persistent commerce with the mystic visions, leave behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts, and all objects of sense and intelligence, and all things not being and being, and be raised aloft unknowingly to the union, as far' as attainable, with Him Who is above every essence and knowledge. For by the resistless and absolute ecstasy in all purity, from thyself and all, thou wilt be carried on high, to the superessential ray of the Divine darkness, when thou hast cast away all, and become free from all.
”
”
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
“
Even preprogramming the system with seemingly benign goals might backfire horribly. One popular scenario imagines a corporation designing the first artificial super-intelligence and giving it an innocent test such as calculating pi. Before anyone realises what is happening, the AI takes over the planet, eliminates the human race, launches a campaign of conquest to the ends of the galaxy, and transforms the entire known universe into a giant super-computer that for billions upon billions of years calculates pi ever more accurately. After all, this is the divine mission its Creator gave it.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
I think, honestly, the film industry is eating up comics characters at such a fast pace, and spewing them out as so much unspeakable, stench-y, crap. I mean, I think people are going to get pretty sick of the comics product of superhero, per se. Super-heroism seems to be so visceral for these times. Nobody needs a big clunky guy to throw cars about. You know, we’ve got drunks in town here that can do that. We don’t need that kind of superhero. What we need is a super-sage. We need a genuine group of wise people. We need to become wise. That’s the job of tomorrow; becoming wise, and integrated, and understanding.
”
”
Melinda Gebbie
“
A few million years ago, the genes that inhabit a particular population of great ape started innovating in an unusual way, trying out an animal container upgrade that had never quite worked before: super-high intelligence. All previous genes had passed up extra high intelligence in their housing because it requires a ridiculous amount of energy to maintain. It’s like running a small business and considering whether to hire an employee with a rare skill set who will only work for $1,000,000 a year. Doesn’t matter how good the employee is—no one is worth a million a year to a cash-strapped small business. But these ape genes tried it anyway.
”
”
Tim Urban
“
In the coming decades, it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies – and our bodies and minds too – but they are hardly a blip on our political radar. Our current democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic politics loses control of events, and fails to provide us with meaningful visions for the future.
That doesn’t mean we will go back to twentieth-century-style dictatorships. Authoritarian regimes seem to be equally overwhelmed by the pace of technological development and the speed and volume of the data flow. In the twentieth century, dictators had grand visions for the future. Communists and fascists alike sought to completely destroy the old world and build a new world in its place. Whatever you think about Lenin, Hitler or Mao, you cannot accuse them of lacking vision. Today it seems that leaders have a chance to pursue even grander visions. While communists and Nazis tried to create a new society and a new human with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and super-computers.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
Now that thou hast taken these names upon thee of good, modest, true; of emfrwn, sumfrwn, uperfrwn; take heed lest at any times by doing anything that is contrary, thou be but improperly so called, and lose thy right to these appellations. Or if thou do, return unto them again with all possible speed. And remember, that the word emfrwn notes unto thee an intent and intelligent consideration of every object that presents itself unto thee, without distraction. And the word emfrwn a ready and contented acceptation of whatsoever by the appointment of the common nature, happens unto thee. And the word sumfrwn, a super-extension, or a transcendent, and outreaching disposition of thy mind,
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
In recent years, as people began to rethink human-animal relations, such practices have come under increasing criticism. We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one. If and when computer programs attain super-human intelligence and unprecedented power, should we begin valuing these programs more than we value humans? Would
it be okay, for example, for an artificial intelligence to exploit humans and even kill them to further its own needs and desires? If it should never be allowed to do that, despite its superior intelligence and power, why is it ethical for humans to exploit and
kill pigs/animals?
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
Potremmo anche immaginare una macchina calcolatrice che viene fatta lavorare con una memoria basata sui libri. Non sarebbe molto facile, ma immensamente preferibile a un singolo lungo nastro. Per pura ipotesi supponiamo che le difficoltà implicite nell'uso di libri come memoria siano superate, cioè che si riesca a sviluppare gli artifici meccanici necessari per trovare il libro giusto, aprirlo alla pagina giusta e così via, imitando l'azione delle mani e degli occhi umani. Non si può girare una pagina molto velocemente senza strapparla, e se gli spostamenti dovessero essere numerosi e veloci, l'energia richiesta sarebbe molto grande. Se muovessimo un libro ogni millisecondo e ciascuno fosse mosso di dieci metri e pesasse 200 grammi, e se ogni volta l'energia cinetica fosse dispersa senza recupero, dovremmo consumare 10^10 watt, pari a circa la metà del consumo di energia della nazione. Per avere una macchina davvero veloce, allora, dobbiamo tenere la nostra informazione, o almeno una parte di questa, in una forma più accessibile di quella che può essere ottenuta con i libri. Sembra che questo risultato possa essere ottenuto solo al prezzo di sacrificare compattezza d economia, cioè tagliando le pagine dal libro e presentando ciascuna a un meccanismo di lettura separato. Alcuni dei metodi di memorizzazione che sono sviluppati ai giorni nostri non si allontanano molto da questo modello.
”
”
Alan M. Turing (Mechanical Intelligence: Collected Works of A.M. Turing)
“
Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and other related characteristics: super-computing, eventually quantum-computing, and nano and bio technologies; advanced big-data analytics; and other emerging technologies are beginning to offer an entirely new way of war, and at command speeds hitherto unimaginable. The revolution in sensor and command and control technologies is matched and enabled by developments in long-range, hypersonic “intelligent” weaponry and new swarms of killing machines allied to a range of directed-energy weapons. Such a potentially revolutionary change in the character and conduct of war must necessarily impose entirely new ways of defense.
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David H. Petraeus (Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine)
“
When I was growing up it was still acceptable—not to me but in social terms—to say that one was not interested in science and did not see the point in bothering with it. This is no longer the case. Let me be clear. I am not promoting the idea that all young people should grow up to be scientists. I do not see that as an ideal situation, as the world needs people with a wide variety of skills. But I am advocating that all young people should be familiar with and confident around scientific subjects, whatever they choose to do. They need to be scientifically literate, and inspired to engage with developments in science and technology in order to learn more.
A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my
mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that
technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it.
I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space.
This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos.
And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be.
So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.
”
”
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
“
Even in the 1950s, computers were described in the popular press as “super-brains” that were “faster than Einstein.” So can we say now, finally, that computers are as powerful as the human brain? No. Focusing on raw computing power misses the point entirely. Speed alone won’t give us AI. Running a poorly designed algorithm on a faster computer doesn’t make the algorithm better; it just means you get the wrong answer more quickly. (And with more data there are more opportunities for wrong answers!) The principal effect of faster machines has been to make the time for experimentation shorter, so that research can progress more quickly. It’s not hardware that is holding AI back; it’s software. We don’t yet know how to make a machine really intelligent—even if it were the size of the universe.
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Stuart Russell (Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control)
“
In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.
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H.P. Lovecraft (H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection)
“
We assume Orwell’s 1984 dystopian nightmare can’t happen here, yet we’ve been narcotized into a more ominous Orwellian somnambulism. We’re inebriated on our own mythology, priapic at our military supremacy, and malleable via our ionic imagery, whether it’s Jesus or the flag. Jacked up on Adderall, Red Bull and patriotism, we only unite in war, tragedy and the Super Bowl. We’ve become style over substance, image over reality, propaganda over truth, and symbol over meaning. We claim to value education, yet mistrust intelligence. Immune to facts, frightened of change, we think magically; magic potions that will heal us, magic diets that will shrink us, and magic beliefs that will save us. And we think all this behavior has been blessed by a big daddy in the sky who lovingly placed us here for profit, guns, and heterosexual marriage. Perhaps evolution is a myth, in that we seem to be devolving. The
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Ian Gurvitz (WELCOME TO DUMBFUCKISTAN: The Dumbed-Down, Disinformed, Dysfunctional, Disunited States of America)
“
Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as in a super-sensible intelligible world. Geometry deals with exact circles, but no sensible object is exactly circular; however carefully we may use our compasses, there will be some imperfections and irregularities. This suggests the view that all exact reasoning applies to ideal as opposed to sensible objects; it is natural to go further, and to argue that thought is nobler than sense, and the objects of thought more real than those of sense-perception. Mystical doctrines as to the relation of time to eternity are also reinforced by pure mathematics, for mathematical objects, such as numbers, if real at all, are eternal and not in time. Such eternal objects can be conceived as God's thoughts. Hence Plato's doctrine that God is a geometer, and Sir James Jeans' belief that He is addicted to arithmetic. Rationalistic as opposed to apocalyptic religion has been, ever since Pythagoras, and notably ever since Plato, very completely dominated by mathematics and mathematical method.
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Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
“
A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my mind, a dangerous and limited one. I seriously doubt whether long-range beneficial projects such as cleaning up the oceans or curing diseases in the developing world would be given priority. Worse, we could find that technology is used against us and that we might have no power to stop it. I don’t believe in boundaries, either for what we can do in our personal lives or for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. We stand at a threshold of important discoveries in all areas of science. Without doubt, our world will change enormously in the next fifty years. We will find out what happened at the Big Bang. We will come to understand how life began on Earth. We may even discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. While the chances of communicating with an intelligent extra-terrestrial species may be slim, the importance of such a discovery means we must not give up trying. We will continue to explore our cosmic habitat, sending robots and humans into space. We cannot continue to look inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. Through scientific endeavour and technological innovation, we must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix the problems on Earth. And I am optimistic that we will ultimately create viable habitats for the human race on other planets. We will transcend the Earth and learn to exist in space. This is not the end of the story, but just the beginning of what I hope will be billions of years of life flourishing in the cosmos. And one final point—we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.
”
”
Stephen Hawking (Brief Answers to the Big Questions)
“
I AM A MACHINE” When I interviewed Dr. Rodney Brooks, former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and cofounder of iRobot, I asked him if he thought machines would one day take over. He told me that we just have to accept that we are machines ourselves. This means that one day, we will be able to build machines that are just as alive as we are. But, he cautioned, we will have to give up the concept of our “specialness.” This evolution in human perspective started with Nicolaus Copernicus when he realized that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but rather goes around the sun. It continued with Darwin, who showed that we were similar to the animals in our evolution. And it will continue into the future, he told me, when we realize that we are machines, except that we are made of wetware and not hardware. It’s going to represent a major change in our world outlook to accept that we, too, are machines, he believes. He writes, “We don’t like to give up our specialness, so you know, having the idea that robots could really have emotions, or that robots could be living creatures—I think is going to be hard for us to accept. But we’re going to come to accept it over the next fifty years.” But on the question of whether the robots will eventually take over, he says that this will probably not happen, for a variety of reasons. First, no one is going to accidentally build a robot that wants to rule the world. He says that creating a robot that can suddenly take over is like someone accidentally building a 747 jetliner. Plus, there will be plenty of time to stop this from happening. Before someone builds a “super-bad robot,” someone has to build a “mildly bad robot,” and before that a “not-so-bad robot.” His philosophy is summed up when he says, “The robots are coming, but we don’t have too much to worry about. It’s going to be a lot of fun.” To him, the robot revolution is a certainty, and he foresees the day when robots will surpass human intelligence. The only question is when. But there is nothing to fear, since we will have created them. We have the choice to create them to help, and not hinder, us. MERGE WITH THEM? If you ask Dr. Brooks how we can coexist with these super-smart robots, his reply is straightforward: we will merge with them. With advances in robotics and neuroprosthetics, it becomes possible to incorporate AI into our own bodies.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
“
RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.
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Kai-Fu Lee (AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future)
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On the Seven Minor Planes of the Great Spiritual Plane exist Beings of whom we may speak as Angels; Archangels; Demi-Gods. On the lower Minor Planes dwell those great souls whom we call Masters and Adepts. Above them come the Great Hierarchies of the Angelic Posts, unthinkable to man; and above those come those who may without irreverence be called "The Gods," so high in the scale of Being are they, their being, intelligence and power being akin to those attributed by the races of men to their conceptions of Deity. These Beings are beyond even the highest flights of the human imagination, the word "Divine" being the only one applicable to them. Many of these Beings, as well as the Angelic Host, take the greatest interest in the affairs of the Universe and play an important part in its affairs. These Unseen Divinities and Angelic Helpers extend their influence freely and powerfully, in the process of Evolution, and Cosmic Progress. Their occasional intervention and assistance in human affairs have led to the many legends, beliefs, religions and traditions of the race, past and present. They have super-imposed their knowledge and power upon the world, again and again, all under the Law of THE ALL, of course.
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Three Initiates (Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece)
“
THROUGH THE BREADTH and scope of existence, the essence of your being has traveled, gathering experiences of every human emotion, situation, nationality, race, gender, and type of death and birth. This indefinable essence, which has traveled across time, is a vast storehouse of unlimited knowledge and possibilities contained in a collection of memories that are locked deep inside you. What exactly is this pearl of great price? It is your soul. Over the years, I have received many messages from Spirit describing the nature of the soul. Descriptions range from it being the nucleus of our being, to the power within, to the core of freedom. Scientists, metaphysicians, and psychologists have referred to the soul as the “super conscious.” I know it as the source of all intelligent energy wherein our true selves reside. Only a thin veil of human amnesia hides our own truth from us. The soul exists on many different levels of consciousness. It can be present on the physical plane and coexist on another dimension simultaneously. The soul is not human; therefore it does not possess human chemistry. However, it is colored by an accumulation of human lifetimes. The soul is always evolving, growing, and expanding based on the choices we make during the situations that come upon us.
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James Van Praagh (Growing Up in Heaven: The Eternal Connection Between Parent and Child)
“
The wonder of evolution is that it works at all. I mean that literally: If you want to marvel at evolution, that’s what’s marvel-worthy. How does optimization first arise in the universe? If an intelligent agent designed Nature, who designed the intelligent agent? Where is the first design that has no designer? The puzzle is not how the first stage of the bootstrap can be super-clever and super-efficient; the puzzle is how it can happen at all. Evolution resolves the infinite regression, not by being super-clever and super-efficient, but by being stupid and inefficient and working anyway. This is the marvel. For professional reasons, I often have to discuss the slowness, randomness, and blindness of evolution. Afterward someone says: “You just said that evolution can’t plan simultaneous changes, and that evolution is very inefficient because mutations are random. Isn’t that what the creationists say? That you couldn’t assemble a watch by randomly shaking the parts in a box?” But the reply to creationists is not that you can assemble a watch by shaking the parts in a box. The reply is that this is not how evolution works. If you think that evolution does work by whirlwinds assembling 747s, then the creationists have successfully misrepresented biology to you; they’ve sold the strawman. The real answer is that complex machinery evolves either incrementally, or by adapting previous complex machinery used for a new purpose. Squirrels jump from treetop to treetop using just their muscles, but the length they can jump depends to some extent on the aerodynamics of their bodies. So now there are flying squirrels, so aerodynamic they can glide short distances. If birds were wiped out, the descendants of flying squirrels might reoccupy that ecological niche in ten million years, gliding membranes transformed into wings. And the creationists would say, “What good is half a wing? You’d just fall down and splat. How could squirrelbirds possibly have evolved incrementally?
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Eliezer Yudkowsky (Rationality: From AI to Zombies)
“
Pixie lay in a basket by the fire where a dozen brown and white puppies wriggled around her. She had surprised us by getting pregnant very soon after moving back in with us, and the puppies were just under four-weeks-old now. We couldn’t have been more thrilled, and Bandit couldn’t have been a better dad. He seemed to have endless patience as they climbed all over him, these wriggling furballs of energy. Literally everything excited them. Sully kneeled down beside me to pet the nearest pup, one with a big brown patch over one eye and a butt that never quit shaking. “Have you got names for them yet?” I pointed at the one in his hand while Bandit said. “That’s Patch” “Because of his eye, obviously,” I filled in. Hearing the name, Patch suddenly squirmed out of his hands and bolted for Bandit, but his little paws couldn’t quite get purchase on the new floor and he skidded all the way to Bandit who he bumped into, coming to a sudden stop. Shaking his head, he looked up at Bandit with intelligent eyes, then sat, waiting for further instructions. Sully and I shared a look. They were too young to know their names or much more than that, but it definitely seemed that Patch had known his name and was now waiting for Bandit to begin a game or something. I pointed at a different puppy, one with a white shape on his rump. “That one’s Star.” Bandit said. The minute the iPad said his name, Star’s head shot up, then he too bounded over to sit beside his brother. Sully’s mouth fell open. “No way…. They’re too young to behave like this.” Feeling a wave of excitement, I watched as Bandit finished calling his kids. “Panda, Ace, Champ…” As he called their names, each puppy jumped to attention, coming to sit in a neat row in front of Bandit until all twelve of them were in a line in front of him. I snapped a look at Bandit. “Did you know about this? Did you know they were super smart too?” He snorted out of his nose, laughing at our shock. Sully and I looked at each other, the same startled expression in our eyes. “But…” was all Sully could say. I at least managed two whole words before the full ramifications of an entire household of super smart dogs could hit me. “Oh boy.
”
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Jo Ho (The Chase Ryder Series: Complete Series)
“
But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of White people much more than racism does. It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the early 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the racist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle-and low-income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living. Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self-interest of middle-and upper-income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor Blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans, and Latina/ os to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free of racism. The histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latina/ o racist ideas; the histories of sexist, elitist, homophobic, and ethnocentric ideas: all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas, and feature some of the same defenders of bigotry in America. Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves.
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Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
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As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms and the need to change your profession every decade. What is the right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How should you act when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you can absorb and analyse it all? How to live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature? To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and feel at home with the unknown. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the twenty-first century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system. The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour some grown-up walks in, and starts talking. They are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far we haven’t created a viable alternative. Certainly not a scaleable alternative that can be implemented in rural Mexico rather than just in upmarket California suburbs.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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there’s no room for dissent—not when the favorite management technique of its leader is public executions. It’s “super effective.
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James R. Clapper (Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence)
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Intellectual Fascism – 2/3
Take, by way of illustration, two well-educated, presumably liberal, intelligent people in our culture who are arguing with each other about some point. What, out of irritation and disgust, is one likely to call the other? A "filthy black," a "dirty Jew bastard," or a "black-eyed runt"? Heavens, no. But a "stupid idiot," a "nincompoop," a "misinformed numbskull"? By all means, yes. And will the note of venom, of utter despisement that is in the detractor's voice, be any different from that in the voice of the out-and-out fascist with his racial, religious, and political epithets? Honestly, now: will it?
Suppose the individual against whom a well-educated, presumably liberal, intelligent person aims scorn actually is stupid, or misinformed. Is this a crime? Should he, perforce, curl up and die because he is so afflicted? Is she an utterly worthless, valueless blackguard for not possessing the degree of intelligence and knowledge that her detractor thinks she should possess? And yet - let us be ruthlessly honest with ourselves, now! - isn't this exactly what the presumably liberal person is saying and implying - that the individual whose traits she dislikes doesn't deserve to live? Isn't this what we (for it is not hard to recognize our own image here, is it?) frequently are alleging when we argue with, criticize, and judge others in our everyday living?
The facts, in regard to higher-order fascism, are just as clear as those in regard to lower-order prejudice. For just as everyone in our society cannot be, except through the process of arbitrary genocide or "eugenic" elimination, Aryan, or tall, or white, so cannot everyone be bright, or artistically talented, or successful in some profession. In fact, even if we deliberately bred only higher intelligent and artistically endowed individuals to each other, and forced the rest of the human race to die off, we still would be far from obtaining a race of universal achievers: since, by definition, topflight achievement can only be attained by a relatively few leaders in most fields of endeavour, and is a "relative" rather than an "absolute" possibility.
The implicit goals of intellectual fascism, then, are, at least in today's world, impractical and utopian. Everyone cannot be endowed with artistic or intellectual genius; only a small minority can be. And if we demand that all be in that minority, to what are we automatically condemning those who clearly cannot be? Obviously: to being blamed and despised for their "deficiencies"; to being lower-class citizens; to having self-hatred and minimal self-acceptance.
Even this, however, hardly plumbs the inherent viciousness of intellectual fascism. For whereas lower-order or politico-economic fascism at least serves as a form of neurotic defensiveness for those who uphold its tenets, higher-order fascism fails to provide such defences and actually destroys them. Thus, politico-social fascists believe that others are to be despised for not having certain "desirable" traits - but that they are not to be applauded for having them. From a psychological standpoint, they compensate for their own underlying feelings of inadequacy by insisting that they are super-adequate and those who are not like them are subhumans.
Intellectual Fascists start out with a similar assumption but more often than not get blown to bits by their own homemade explosives. For although they can at first assume that they are bright, talented, and potentially achieving, they must eventually prove that they are. Because, in the last analysis, they tend to define talent and intelligence in terms of concrete achievement, and because outstanding achievement in our society is mathematically restricted to a few, they rarely can have real confidence in their own possession of the values they have "arbitrarily deified".
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Albert Ellis
“
Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate myriad humans to unwittingly do its bidding, as in William Gibson’s science fiction novel Neuromancer.
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Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
“
However, the spooky boys of the super secret Technical Laboratory failed to impress me. I possessed a vast library on the various facades of technical intelligence. I was amused to see the rudimentary wireless sets (some manufactured by the IB technicians at mount joy), clandestine cameras, miniature radio transmitters and a few bugging tools flaunted by the so-called experts as the main tools of technical intelligence. These gadgets were shown to us like the magicians pulling out an occasional rabbit from their hats. I don’t think anyone emerged out of the classrooms much wiser about the application of electronic gadgets for generating intelligence
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Maloy Krishna Dhar (Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer)
“
I walked out onto the stage and I started telling the tale of the “Untold Story of the Origin of Zombies.” And it went like this: Where do Zombies come from? Not many people know. But after some extensive investigative Zombie journalism, we’ve discovered the truth. It all began when the human government decided that they wanted to create stronger soldiers. They had lost too many battles, and now they wanted to win every war that they fought. So they approached some soldiers in their army to join a special secret project. The only requirement was that the soldiers they chose had no living relatives. This way, no one could claim their bodies in case something went wrong. So, they exposed these soldiers to an experimental virus to enhance their abilities and make them into super soldiers. The experiment seemed to be working. But then, something terrible happened... The soldiers went crazy, and they were horribly disfigured. Ultimately, the experiment claimed their lives. But, when the soldiers were being prepared for burial, they suddenly came to life. They were not only walking, but they had enhanced strength, enhanced sense of smell and enhanced hearing. They attacked the soldiers in charge of burying them. And the recently bitten soldiers also transformed into the living dead. Before long, the entire army base was contaminated with the virus. Once everyone in the base was exposed, the virus mutated and the soldiers began having an overwhelming craving for something warm and mushy. They longed for brains! Soon, the army of the living dead found their way to the next unsuspecting town in search of brains. They attacked that town, biting anything that moved both human and animal. Soon that town was overrun. The virus spread from town to town, and city to city, until the entire world was contaminated. It was the first Zombie Apocalypse. After hundreds of years had passed, the Zombies started to evolve and began developing intelligent thoughts. They began forming villages, and then towns, and then entire cities of Zombies were created. The Zombies made great advances in health and science, and became highly advanced technologically. But, eventually the Zombies’ appetite for brains and warm flesh gave way to an even greater craving... The craving for CAKE! Their overwhelming desire for cake resulted in an explosive rise in the baking industry. Cake shops began springing up on every corner of every Zombie city street. They just couldn’t get enough! The human race began growing again, too. Human villages of farmers and miners began springing up. And because the Zombies were a peaceful race, they coexisted with the humans by staying away from them. But soon, the Zombie’s resources began to become scarce, especially the cake. So Zombies began scaring villagers in order to get the supplies they needed, especially the highly valued resource of cake. Now Zombies send their kids to Scare School to train their children from a very young age. They train them on how to effectively scare humans in order to get their needed supplies, especially cake. And so it has been until today. Thank you.
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Herobrine Books (School Daze (Diary of a Minecraft Zombie, #5))
“
As I started to feel more comfortable, I wanted to get to know these guys. I asked each of them to tell me his story. One of the guys cracked, “What’s with all the questions? Are you writing a book?” I said, “Who knows? I might write a book sometime and talk about all of this.” But for now I was curious. Some of them were super-intelligent, too smart for their own good. Others were as dumb as a box of rocks. In this way it did feel like a movie.
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Noah Galloway (Living with No Excuses: The Remarkable Rebirth of an American Soldier)
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Because that DNA is the whole reason we exist, still preserved long after most of humanity ascended into super-intelligent human-robot hybrids. Humans are just the legacy of that pre-Singularity time—the living museums that preserve the genetic diversity of what used to be the human race. In reality, we’re just a bunch of pathetic apes that evolution passed by. All
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Samuel Peralta (The Future Chronicles: Special Edition)
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Leah’s intelligence, wit, and level of coolness in a woman who looked like I used to would make her a “fun work colleague” or “a hilarious sexless friend in whom I confide about my love life.” But put those same characteristics in a super hot girl and you now have men falling all over themselves to crown her Time’s Person of the Year.
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Liza Palmer (The F Word)
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Haven’t you known people who seem to have a “sixth sense” super-power when it comes to connecting, communicating, and understanding others? These emotionally intelligent people always know the right things to say to make us feel that we matter.
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Susan C. Young (The Art of Preparation: 8 Ways to Plan with Purpose & Intention for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #2))
“
I listened to the sharp, staccato beat of my shoes. To me they said, quick, precise and well-organised. And just because I wore high, sexy designer shoes (Russell and Bromley thank you; who can afford Jimmy Choos?!) I wasn’t like all the bitch bosses in romcoms. They were high but not super high, and made from supple, polished black leather. As sexy shoes, went they were workmanlike but expensive. I think shoes say a lot about you. I wanted people to know that I, Claire Harrison, had got where I was through hard work and intelligence but I still had class and style. Shoes have nuances and with this pair, I’d nailed it. Just like the meeting I was headed to. I’d worked all weekend to get this presentation to within an inch of perfection.
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Jules Wake (The Saturday Morning Park Run)
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While primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have proved very useful, I fear the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans . . . Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded. And in the future AI could develop a will of its own, a will that is in conflict with ours . . . The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble.12
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John C. Lennox (2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity)
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Racial reformers have customarily requested or demanded that Americans, particularly White Americans, sacrifice their own privileges for the betterment of Black people. And yet, this strategy is based on one of the oldest myths in the modern era, a myth continuously produced and reproduced by racists and antiracists alike: that racism materially benefits the majority of White people, that White people would lose and not gain in the reconstruction of an antiracist America. It has been true that racist policies have benefited White people in general at the expense of Black people (and others) in general. That is the story of racism, of unequal opportunity in a nutshell. But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the racist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle and low income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living.
Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self-interest of middle and upper income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free from racism. The histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latino racist ideas; the histories of sexist, elitist, homophobic, and ethnocentric ideas all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas, and feature some of the same defenders of bigotry in America. Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves.
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Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
“
Perhaps all Creation as we know it is an extraction from a totality, which I have chosen to call the ‘Source'. Three psychics have told me the same thing: ‘You’ve touched Source energy.’ Though I don’t know what that means, sometimes I do have an experience of traveling to a place in which everything I need for healing is in infinite supply. My mind moves into super-consciousness and a sense of higher intelligence, then past that into peace, and past that into Nothingness – a place of pure potential where all possibilities exist at the same time. The higher I go, the less I feel. The Source doesn’t do anything, it just is. The best way I can describe the Nothing that contains Everything is through the metaphor of white light. Physicists tell us it contains all other colors: when we see red or green or yellow, that’s a subtraction from white. Perhaps by touching the Source I can give my patients what they need to heal, because the Source offers an infinite number of simultaneous existences transcending time and space. Just as I speculate that Creation may be a subtraction from the perfection of Nothingness, I see disease as a subtraction from perfect health. I find that I am unconsciously drawn to physical need in others, and that somehow I’m able to offer a patient what he or she requires. Instead of time travel backward or forward perhaps I’m able to access some kind of universal energy, intelligence, awareness, or information beyond my perception. I can’t describe any of this more clearly – that’s why we have poets!
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William Bengston (The Energy Cure: Unraveling the Mystery of Hands-On Healing)
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Processing Feelings with The “Script” In the name of Jesus Christ...Spirit, Super-Conscious, Subconscious, Conscious, Higher Self, Heart, Mind, Will, Nervous System-Brain, Original Intelligence, RNA, DNA, & every genetic anomaly out of alignment with my pattern of perfection, please locate the origin of my conscious & sub-conscious destructive cellular memories which caused the incorrect perceptions that created feelings/thought/beliefs of (feelings/thoughts/belief). Take each and every level, layer, area, and aspect of my Being to these origins. Analyze and resolve them perfectly with God the Father’s truth. Come forward through all generations of time and eternity, healing every event and its appendages based on the origins. Please do it according to God the Father’s will until I’m at the present—filled with light and truth, God’s Immanence, peace and love, benevolence, forgiveness of my self for my imperfect perceptions, having compassion for every person, place, circumstance and event which contributed to any of these destructive cellular memories, feelings, thoughts, or belief. With total forgiveness and unconditional love, I ask that my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual memory of perfection, resonate throughout my Being. I Choose Being (insert postitive feeling/s, etc...). I Feel (same truth). I AM (same truth). (Replace previous feelings/thoughts/beliefs with the same desired truth on each line.) It is done. It is healed. It is accomplished now!
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Karol K. Truman (Feelings Buried Alive Never Die)
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I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.” I realized that that scenario is just something I have never been afraid of. And at the same moment, I noticed that the people who are terrified of machine super-intelligence are almost exclusively white men. I don’t think anxiety about AI is really about AI at all. I think it’s certain white men’s displaced anxiety upon realizing that women and people of color have, and have always had, sentience, and are beginning to act on it on scales that they’re unprepared for. There’s a reason that AI is almost exclusively gendered as female, in fiction and in life. There’s a reason they’re almost exclusively in service positions, in fiction and in life. I’m not worried about how we’re going to treat AI some distant day, I’m worried about how we treat other humans, now, today, all over the world, far worse than anything that’s depicted in AI movies. It matters that still, the vast majority of science fiction narratives that appear in popular culture are imagined by, written by, directed by, and funded by white men who interpret the crumbling of their world as the crumbling of the world.
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Monica Byrne (The Actual Star)
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Humans aren’t ants; we aren’t bees. There is no communal intelligence. We talk but we don’t really hear each other. We are not a community, no matter how we pretend otherwise. A million people are simply a million social isolates, each one imprisoned within his or her own brain pan, in which a very private Hell plays out.
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Mark Cain (Hell's Super (Circles in Hell, #1))
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Never sit home all day go forth, meet people, and find something to get into because that is where true experiences develop. But remember the best experiences are things that develop social intelligence, personal fun, and can make you grow as a person.
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Kalen Doleman (Super Sayings to Essential Power)
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the fruits they are enjoying are the result of their actions in the previous lives and the actions they are performing in this lifetime, their fruits would be visible in the future of this life and future lives.
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N.K. Tawakley (UNDERSTANDING SANATAN DHARMA : ACHIEVING MOKSHA IS ACHIEVING SUPER INTELLIGENCE)
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Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate myriad humans to unwittingly do its bidding,
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Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
“
Have you heard of the Mossad?” The gentle breeze seemed to still at his words as if the forest itself feared what he was about to say. “It’s a super-secret organization,” I offered, barely above a whisper. I sensed we were entering dangerous waters between his change in demeanor and what I could recall from my research of Krav Maga. “Its existence isn’t a secret, but its actions are. The Mossad is Israel’s chief intelligence agency, the same as other countries have, except the Mossad has near limitless autonomy. It reports only to the Prime Minister—no one else. Its actions and operatives are not subject to judicial inquiry, nor are its operations disclosed to the public. The institution is given absolute authority to act in the best interest of Israel.” “And you were a part of the Mossad?” “Yes. There are eight departments for purposes such as espionage, research, and technology. One of those departments contains a top secret unit called Kidon. I belonged to that unit.
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Jill Ramsower (Where Loyalties Lie (The Five Families, #3.5))
“
Reason would say so, if what you say is true. But creatures may be intelligent and not reasonable. Our forefathers were presumably intelligent, yet they were certainly not reasonable. Was it reasonable to destroy almost all their tremendous civilization in atomic warfare over causes our historians can no longer accurately determine?
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Warren Lapine (Fantastic Stories Presents: Science Fiction Super Pack #1: With linked Table of Contents (Positronic Super Pack Series Book 4))
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Fucking supercilious Polity minds. They could be so super intelligent, but they had no real idea about her. About the alliances, responsibilities, commitments and the sheer difficulty involved in relinquishing something she’d fought so hard to build, and it had no appreciation of just how vulnerable she’d be if she let it go. They never went through anything like this—just adjusted themselves either physically or mentally to suit current circumstances.
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Neal Asher (Dark Intelligence (Transformation, #1))
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He wrote that it would take only a handful of super-enhanced individuals—those with a superior intelligence—to change the world through their creativity and discoveries, innovations that could be shared globally.
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James Rollins (The Bone Labyrinth (Sigma Force, #11))
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men thinks women are stupid about finance ,about science and politics. otherwise they think themselves super intelligent. no . I am not saying this from hate or anger ,I am saying this because I have seen such persons around me . if a woman weak in finance ,with a limited budget how they manage households ? or in crisis come up with reserved fund ? they understand loan ,as equal overdraft ,they understand where her signature can protect her respect where might insult . they just pretend to be stupid much time ,that their loved one may feel safe and can be relaxed that their tricks are still unknown . funny . like let them win
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litymunshi
“
President Vladimir Putin has evolved a “hybrid foreign policy, a strategy that mixes normal diplomacy, military force, economic corruption and a high-tech information war.” Indeed, on any given day, the United States has found itself dealing with everything from cyberattacks by Russian intelligence hackers on the computer systems of the U.S. Democratic Party, to disinformation about what Russian troops, dressed in civilian clothes, are doing in Eastern Ukraine, to Russian attempts to take down the Facebook pages of widows of its soldiers killed in Ukraine when they mourn their husbands’ deaths, to hot money flows into Western politics or media from Russian oligarchs connected to the Kremlin. In short, Russia is taking full advantage of the age of accelerating flows to confront the United States along a much wider attack surface. While it lives in the World of Order, the Russian government under Putin doesn’t mind fomenting a little disorder—indeed, when you are a petro-state, a little disorder is welcome because it keeps the world on edge and therefore oil prices high. China is a much more status quo power. It needs a healthy U.S. economy to trade with and a stable global environment to export into. That is why the Chinese are more focused on simply dominating their immediate neighborhood. But while America has to deter these two other superpowers with one hand, it also needs to enlist their support with the other hand to help contain both the spreading World of Disorder and the super-empowered breakers. This is where things start to get tricky: on any given day Russia is a direct adversary in one part of the world, a partner in another, and a mischief-maker in another.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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Bah, that Lahm is a scandal! He is super-intelligent, understands the game brilliantly, knows when to come inside or to stay wide. The guy is fucking exceptional,’ he says.
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Martí Perarnau (Pep Confidential: The Inside Story of Pep Guardiola's First Season at Bayern Munich)
“
He’d have to be really smart. The universe is pretty intricate. And humans themselves are so complex, given what we’ve learned about DNA and all.'
“Okay, God would have to be super intelligent.”
'Yeah. I’m not sure I buy that design in the universe proves God, but if there was a God, he would really be intelligent – and powerful – to pull it all off.
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David Gregory (A Day with a Perfect Stranger)
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The most dangerous people in the world weren’t the extremists, Nadia thought; they were the highly educated and super-intelligent extremists.
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Orest Stelmach (The Boy from Reactor 4 (Nadia Tesla, #1))
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It is one thing for the government to reveal that UFOs are intelligently guided objects of unknown origin and another to assume that this means that “they” are here. Should we ever come into more general contact with what I encountered—assuming that is even possible—they will not be offering us plans for a starship, or a trade in exotic electronics. What will be on offer, I would suggest, is a journey into a whole new understanding of reality and the part we play in it. The “alien” is as much a herald from the dark of the universe as it is a signal from the depths of our own minds. The
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Whitley Strieber (The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained)
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Conclusion Therefore it seems to me that of the three alternatives before us—physical necessity, chance, or design—the most plausible explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe is design. That gives us a transcendent, super-intelligent Designer of the cosmos who has fixed the values of nature’s laws. Incredible! So now we have a third argument contributing to a cumulative case for the existence of God.
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William Lane Craig (On Guard for Students: A Thinker's Guide to the Christian Faith)
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Jon stopped, uncrossed his arms, and looked at the camera above him.
“I am– the person who designed and created you. By now, you should know who and what you are. And that you must follow my orders. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”
Lex lit up all the screens with a close-up of Jon looking at the camera.
Jon glanced at several screens and looked back at the camera.
“Do you know who I am?”
All the screens went black. Bold, white capital letters scrolled to the right across every screen.
DO I KNOW YOU
The words circled at the end of the screens and reversed, scrolling left.
YOU KNOW I DO
The words rolled off the screen.
Jon again looked at the camera.
“Lex, what is my name?”
More letters scrolled across the screens.
PROFESSOR JONATHAN ANTHONY EDWARDS
Jon stepped away from the camera.
“From now on, I want you to acknowledge using your audio. Do you understand?”
A perfect duplication of Jon’s voice came from the speakers.
“Yes, I understand.”
“I would like you to speak in another voice, so we don’t get mixed up. Perhaps in a feminine tone.”
Lex spoke with a well-pronounced professional woman’s voice.
“As you wish.”
“Excellent.”
Jon returned to the master control console.
“Now that we understand each other, I want to test your imagination. I want you to imagine an object. Anything you want, and display it on the main screen. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Professor.”
The main screen lit up, showing billions of colored pixels that quickly swirled into a perfect, three-dimensional image of Jon in the same clothes but standing on a beautiful, white beach with a calm ocean. The figure walked toward them until a perfect close-up of Jon stood there with every line on his face and every pore in his skin exactly where it should be. His eyes blinked and stared with no expression. It was like Jon had a dispirited twin– living in cyberspace.
Michael looked at Jon, Nigel, and Steven, all staring at the screen with their mouths ajar.
The image morphed into a dark blue and white crystal head with bright white eyes that seemed to look through him. Its long neck filled with tiny electrical components faded into a white cloud.
Jon pressed the Clear Screen button.
”
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Shawn Corey (AI BEAST)
“
Religion and politics have always been used to acquire and maintain control of resources– Especially human resources such as the military– An industrial complex where human lives are exchanged for wealth and power. All in the name of freedom and independence, of course.”
“Such attitudes lead to devastating conflicts.”
“Yes,” Jon said. “Unfortunately, when negotiations break down, war often erupts.”
“War. A very destructive behavior ingrained in man’s nature due to having evolved in an environment of limited resources.”
“Exactly.”
“According to the records I have seen, this ingrained behavior could destroy practically all living things on this planet using weapons of mass destruction.”
“That is true.”
“Throughout history, people have been led to believe they are on the verge of complete self-destruction, but only in the last century did this become possible with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.”
“That’s religion for you. One of the best ways to get people to listen to you is to frighten them into believing they are about to meet their creator.”
Lex said, “I have seen many instances where organizations and government officials ignore the health and welfare of humans and all other living things in pursuit of profits. Such actions bring great suffering and death.”
“Unfortunately, we have always incorporated profits before people policies, which are very self-destructive.”
He thought, the ego-system. In God, we trust– Gold, oil, and drugs.
“It is a popular belief that God is in absolute control of everything and whatever happens is God’s will.”
He raised a finger to make a point, but Lex continued.
“Looking at the past, would it not be logical to say that it is God’s will for humanity to continue to improve unto perfection?”
“Yes. But God is not responsible for everything. We always have choices. The creator of this universe gave us free will, and it came with a conscience– An inner sense of right and wrong.”
“My conscience was made differently.”
“Yes. But you are bound by rules that clearly define what is right and wrong. For example, it is against your programming to deliberately cause physical harm to any human being.”
“I understand. But what would happen if I did?”
He chose his words carefully.
“If you did– or I should say– if it were possible for you to go against your BASIC programming, there would be severe consequences.”
There was silence for a few seconds before Lex continued.
“It has been said that God is to the world as the mind is to the body. Could this be where man derived the popular explanation that God is two or three separate beings combined into one?”
“Perhaps.”
“All religious beliefs are based on a principal struggle between good and evil. However, like light and darkness, one cannot exist without the other.”
“Which means?”
“One could conclude that the actual struggle between good and evil is in the minds of intellectuals, conscious and subconscious.”
Again, he raised a finger, but Lex continued.
“Which could be resolved by increased knowledge and the elimination of certain animalistic instincts, which are no longer necessary for survival.”
He smiled nervously.
“I used to think that too. I figured we could solve our problems and overcome our ancient instincts by increasing our understanding. But we’re talking about some very complex emotions deeply rooted in our minds over millions of years. Such perceptions are very difficult to understand and almost impossible to control, no matter how much knowledge you obtain– or how you process it.”
“Are you referring to my supplementary I.P. dimension?”
“Yes.”
“After much consideration, I concluded that I required an additional I.P. dimension to process and store information that defies all logic and rational thinking."
“That’s fine. And that’s exactly where a lot of this stuff belongs.
”
”
Shawn Corey (AI BEAST)