I find that predicting the course of our lives is like predicting the weather. You might be able to predict your future in the short term, but the longer you look ahead, the less likely you are to be correct.
I'd visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.
At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.
As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did we come from, what happens next?' The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.
We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.
There's been a big void out there, in terms of where I've been and what I am currently working on, I'd like to fill that void now and share my exciting plans for the future.
The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam's sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that...
Day after day with them, I see more and more of my parents in me. I see where all my quirks come from. I see my future.
Google owns YouTube, and recently, I drew a comic about an idea for a YouTube feature - which they actually took seriously and implemented. So I'm thinking that maybe we'll have a future where Google is 'xkcd.'
We have been working hard to think about what our combined needs are going to be in the way of intelligence capabilities, not today but 15 to 20 years in the future.
When you get just a complete sense of blackness or void ahead of you, that somehow the future looks an impossible place to be, and the direction you are going seems to have no purpose, there is this word despair which is a very awful thing to feel.
Look at electricity in human history - it took a few decades for electricity to really revolutionize the American economy. And the Internet will be the same. At some point in the future, we will arrive at a new era of low-hanging fruit.
It is easy to predict that some of the discoveries of research directed towards Grand Challenges - but only the most unexpected ones, and at the most unexpected times - will be the basis of revolutionary improvements in the way that we exploit the po...
I found, when I left, that there were others who felt the same way. We'd meet, they'd come and seek me out, we'd talk about the future. And I found that their depression and pessimism was every bit as acute as mine.
In the most intimate, hidden and innermost ground of the soul, God is always essentially, actively, and substantially present. Here the soul possesses everything by grace which God possesses by nature.
The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
People are what you make them. A scornful look turns into a complete fool a man of average intelligence. A contemptuous indifference turns into an enemy a woman who, well treated, might have been an angel.
Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.
I am a full-time Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a small 501(c)(3) public charity supported primarily by individual donations.
I keep trying to explain to people that the archetype of intelligence is not Dustin Hoffman in 'The Rain Man;' it is a human being, period. It is squishy things that explode in a vacuum, leaving footprints on their moon.
