Evolution
- For species, ecological communities, and ecosystems, adaptability and resilience result from biophysical processes that require the right components to be in place over scales of space and time that may not be amenable to human management.
- The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race…It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded.
- The Big Bang - which today we hold to be the origin of the world - does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator, but, rather, requires it. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.
- I think that local school districts - not the federal government - should make the decision about how they teach science, biology, economics. I want my kids to be taught about evolution; I want my kids to be taught about other theories.
- Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don’t…if you actually look at the bible or the Koran, and get your moral compass from there, it’s horrible – stoning people to death, stoning people for breaking the Sabbath. Now, of course we don’t do that anymore, but the reason we don’t do it is that we pick out those verses of the bible that we like, and reject those verses we don’t like. What criteria do we use to pick out the good ones and reject the bad ones? Non-biblical criteria, non-religious criteria. The same criteria as guide any modern person in their moral compass that has nothing to do with religion.
- The Internet is disrupting every media industry…people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.
- By the end of this century, most of the human race will have become cyborgs [part human, part machine]. The allure will be immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we'll think we've never had it better. The concern I'm raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species.