Oren Etzioni Quotes

"AI is a tool. The choice about how it gets deployed is ours."

"AI is neither good nor evil. It's a tool. It's a technology for us to use."

"Science is going to be revolutionized by AI assistants."

"It's hard for me to speculate about what motivates somebody like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk to talk so extensively about AI. I'd have to guess that talking about black holes gets boring after awhile - it's a slowly developing topic."

"To take intellectual risks is to think about something that can't be done, that doesn't make any sense, and go for it responsibly."

"Sooner or later, the U.S. will face mounting job losses due to advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics."

"Life is short. Don't do the same thing everyone else is doing - that's such a herd mentality. And don't do something that's two percent better than the other person. Do something that changes the world."

"In the past, much power and responsibility over life and death was concentrated in the hands of doctors. Now, this ethical burden is increasingly shared by the builders of AI software."

"The biggest reason we want autonomous cars is to prevent accidents."

"I don't think that all the coal miners - or even more realistically, say, the truck drivers whose jobs may be put out by self-driving cars and trucks - they're all going to go and become web designers and programmers."

"Machine learning is looking for patterns in data. If you start with racist data, you will end up with even more racist models. This is a real problem."

"My dream is to achieve AI for the common good."

"Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an outsized way?"

"An AI utopia is a place where people have income guaranteed because their machines are working for them. Instead, they focus on activities that they want to do, that are personally meaningful like art or, where human creativity still shines, in science."

"I like to say I've been working on big data for so long, it used to be small data when I started working on it."

"There are many valid concerns about AI, from its impact on jobs to its uses in autonomous weapons systems and even to the potential risk of superintelligence."

"Automation has emerged as a bigger threat to American jobs than globalization or immigration combined."

"Taking new technology and incorporating into how people work and live is not easy."

"Just as our roads and bridges are overdue for investment, so is the infrastructure for scientific research; that is, the body of scientific thought and the tools for searching through it."

"The truth is that behind any AI program that works is a huge amount of, A, human ingenuity and, B, blood, sweat and tears. It's not the kind of thing that suddenly takes off like 'Her' or in 'Ex Machina.'"

"Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning, which is a vibrant research area in artificial intelligence, or AI."

"Infrastructure investment in science is an investment in jobs, in health, in economic growth and environmental solutions."

"I could do a whole talk on the question of is AI dangerous.' My response is that AI is not going to exterminate us. It's a tool that's going to empower us."

"At least inside the city of Seattle, driving is going to be a hobby in 2035. It's not going to be a mode of commuting the same way hunting is a hobby for some people, but it's not how most of us get our food."

"Driverless cars are a great thing."

"A universal basic income doesn't give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice."

"When you think of driverless cars, there's a huge potential for these cars to save lives by preventing accidents and by reducing congestion on highways."

"All these things that we've contemplated, whether it's space travel or solutions to diseases that plague us, Ebola virus, all of these things would be a lot more tractable if the machines are trying to solve these problems."

"I think that there are so many problems that we have as a society that AI can help us address."

"I became interested in AI in high school because I read 'Goedel, Escher, Bach,' a book by Douglas Hofstader. He showed how all their work in some ways fit together, and he talked about artificial intelligence. I thought 'Wow, this is what I want to be doing.'"