"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."

"Like a human being, a company has to have an internal communication mechanism, a nervous system, to coordinate its actions."

"Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating."

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."

"Strategically, a major function of the CEO is to look for bad news and encourage the organization to respond to it. Employees must be encouraged to share bad news as much as good news."

"The leader needs to create an environment in which people can analyze the situation and develop a good response."

"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities."

"Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down."

"Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes."

"The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competitors, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose."

"Every company can choose whether to lead or follow the emerging digital trends."

"Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be."

"If you just want to say, Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along, that's fine. If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. … Let's be realistic, who came up with File/Edit/View/Help? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?"

"If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act."

"To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination — and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard."

"When you lose a customer, it can be tempting to tell each other, That customer's not very sharp. They just made the wrong decision."

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.… The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can."

"First we've got population. Now, the world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that (forecast) by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3 (per year)."

"The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together."

"Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system."

"Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services."

"On him moving to concentrate on his charity work"

"If they want we will give them a sleeping bag, but there is something romantic about sleeping under the desk. They want to do it."

"In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will."

"To a certain extent, a little blindness is necessary when you undertake a risk."

"One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity... We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world,"

"The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree."

"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that."

"The moral systems of religion, I think, are superimportant. We've raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief."

"Any operating system without a browser is going to be fucking out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?"

"Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don't act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end."

"Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, I don't know how to spell that. I said, Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay. But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy."

"The flatter the corporate hierarchy, the more likely it is that employees will communicate bad news and act upon it."

"The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future."

"You know, I'm a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that."

"The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system."

"The most important 'speed' issue is often not technical but cultural. It's convincing everyone that the company's survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible."

"A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business."

"The people who resist change will be confronted by the growing number of people who see that better ways are available; thanks to technology."

"To get a big company moving fast, especially on a many-headed opportunity like the Internet, you have to have hundreds of people participating and coming up with ideas."

"We've done some good work, but all of these products become obsolete so fast... It will be some finite number of years, and I don't know the number — before our doom comes."

"We don't have option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives."

"How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes."

"Leaders need to provide strategy and direction and to give employees tools that enable them to gather information and insight from around the world. Leaders shouldn't try to make every decision."

"This leads to the paradox, that because the disease is only in the poor countries, there is not much investment. For example, there is more money put into baldness drugs, than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it is a terrible thing [audience laughter] and rich men are afflicted, so that is why that priority is set."

"We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence — presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something."

"DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created."

"If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about reengineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity."

"In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don't know if there's a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid."

"If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG."

"Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better."

"There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written."

"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. … I'm saying we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say Would you buy a new version because of bugs? You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis."

"We would like every country to be self-sufficient so that both in terms of running a good primary health care system and funding a good primary health care system, it's all OK, and they just participate in regional bodies that have standby capacity to deal with these things. Africa, of all the places in the world, is the furthest behind on being able to do that. And through aid, health and health systems in Africa have improved very, very dramatically."

"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."

"People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten."

"Robots will play an important role in providing physical assistance and even companionship for the elderly."

"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."

"Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other."

"Once you embrace unpleasant news, not as a negative but as evidence of a need for change, you aren't defeated by it. You're learning from it."

"It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of."

"Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive."

"I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64 K to 640 K felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem."

"These four policy prescriptions - strengthening educational opportunities, revamping immigration rules for highly skilled workers, increasing federal funding for basic scientific research, and providing incentives for private-sector R&D - should in my view be top priorities as Congress and the Administration consider how to maintain the nation's leadership in science, technology, and innovation."

"I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing."

"Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important."

"Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time."

"Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning."

"We are in the end game, I'm optimistic that we will be successful. I'm personally very committed"

"Analytical software enables you to shift human resources from rote data collection to value-added customer service and support where the human touch makes a profound difference."

"It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit."

"In the last 20 years, thanks to your hard work, polio has declined by 99 percent. In 1988, 350,000 people got polio. By 2008, the number was down to just a couple of thousand."

"You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong..."

"We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing."

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction."

"The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC."

"Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' — that might be spam."

"Bringing together the right information with the right people will dramatically improve a company's ability to develop and act on strategic business opportunities."

"What we're saying to people is that every idea about ease-of-use, we can develop in software, for the PC, without asking them to buy new hardware, without asking them to throw away their old applications."

"Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it — at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air."

"Gary Kildall was one of the original pioneers of the PC revolution. He was a very creative computer scientist who did excellent work. Although we were competitors, I always had tremendous respect for his contributions to the PC industry. His untimely death was very unfortunate and he and his work will be missed."

"The Internet will help achieve friction free capitalism by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other."

"Embrace bad news to learn where you need the most improvement."

"The need to communicate effectively with your customers will come up again and again."

"Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering."

"Teams should be able to act with the same unity of purpose and focus as a well motivated individual."

"I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them.Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view. I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know."

"The success of the Nigeria programme hinges on the active participation of everyone to make sure that all children are reached by National Immunization Days (NIDs), Immunization Plus Days (IPDs) and the routine immunization programme, if the country capitalizes on the commitments I've heard in the past two days, Nigeria can lead the way to a polio-free Africa."

"The harsh mathematics of polio makes it clear:We cannot maintain a level of one thousand or two thousand cases a year. Either we eradicate polio, or we return to the days of tens of thousands of cases per year. That is no alternative at all. We don't let children die because it is fatiguing to save them. Our commitment as a foundation is to work with partners until no children die from polio."

"Learning from mistakes and constantly improving products is a key in all successful companies."

"If something is expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?"

"Well, one thing that everybody may not be aware of is how fantastic the CDC has been historically. They're the best in the world. They train themselves in terms of how to communicate, including getting bad news out and getting people to take measures that protect themselves."

"The CEO's role in raising a company's corporate IQ is to establish an atmosphere that promotes knowledge sharing and collaboration."

"I wish I wasn't … There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it."

"The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow."

"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers."

"Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company."

"It's not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, Oh my God, Microsoft didn't aim high enough. It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it."

"He [Steve Jobs] showed me the boat he was working on … and talked about how he's looking forward to being on it, even though we both knew there was a good chance that wouldn't happen."

"The world has had a tendency to focus a disproportionate amount of attention on me."

"Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program."

"About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

"In a moment like this, it’s natural to feel unsettled. But history shows that it’s possible to solve the challenges created by new technologies."

"Another thing that’s clear to me is that the future of AI is not as grim as some people think or as rosy as others think. The risks are real, but I am optimistic that they can be managed"

"Many of the problems caused by AI have a historical precedent. For example, it will have a big impact on education, but so did handheld calculators a few decades ago and, more recently, allowing computers in the classroom. We can learn from what’s worked in the past."

"We certainly have not solved the problem of misinformation and deepfakes. But two things make me guardedly optimistic. One is that people are capable of learning not to take everything at face value."

"The other thing that makes me hopeful is that AI can help identify deepfakes as well as create them. Intel, for example, has developed a deepfake detector, and the government agency DARPA is working on technology to identify whether video or audio has been manipulated."

"I don’t think AI’s impact will be as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution, but it certainly will be as big as the introduction of the PC. Word processing applications didn’t do away with office work, but they changed it forever. Employers and employees had to adapt, and they did. The shift caused by AI will be a bumpy transition, but there is every reason to think we can reduce the disruption to people’s lives and livelihoods."

"AI models inherit whatever prejudices are baked into the text they’re trained on. If one reads a lot about, say, physicians, and the text mostly mentions male doctors, then its answers will assume that most doctors are men."

"Although some researchers think hallucinations are an inherent problem, I don’t agree. I’m optimistic that, over time, AI models can be taught to distinguish fact from fiction. OpenAI, for example, is doing promising work on this front."

"“Teachers will have to embrace AI technology as another tool students have access to,” she wrote. “Just like we once taught students how to do a proper Google search, teachers should design clear lessons around how the ChatGPT bot can assist with essay writing. Acknowledging AI’s existence and helping students work with it could revolutionize how we teach.”"

"AI companies need to pursue their work safely and responsibly. That includes protecting people’s privacy, making sure their AI models reflect basic human values, minimizing bias, spreading the benefits to as many people as possible, and preventing the technology from being used by criminals or terrorists."

"The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it."

"In the United States, the best opportunity for reducing inequity is to improve education, particularly making sure that students succeed at math. The evidence shows that having basic math skills sets students up for success, no matter what career they choose. But achievement in math is going down across the country, especially for Black, Latino, and low-income students. AI can help turn that trend around."

"The world needs to make sure that everyone—and not just people who are well-off—benefits from artificial intelligence. Governments and philanthropy will need to play a major role in ensuring that it reduces inequity and doesn’t contribute to it."

"advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent. Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do."

"When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home."

"the demand for people who help other people will never go away. The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example."

"in the next five to 10 years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn. It will know your interests and your learning style so it can tailor content that will keep you engaged. It will measure your understanding, notice when you’re losing interest, and understand what kind of motivation you respond to. It will give immediate feedback."

"Even once the technology is perfected, learning will still depend on great relationships between students and teachers. It will enhance—but never replace—the work that students and teachers do together in the classroom."

"Compared to a computer, our brains operate at a snail’s pace: An electrical signal in the brain moves at 1/100,000th the speed of the signal in a silicon chip!"

"the world needs to establish the rules of the road so that any downsides of artificial intelligence are far outweighed by its benefits, and so that everyone can enjoy those benefits no matter where they live or how much money they have. The Age of AI is filled with opportunities and responsibilities."

"The very good news is that the world has made phenomenal progress in this area over the past several decades. Since 1990, the number of children who die every year has fallen by more than half!"

"I was shocked to learn that every year, 3.1 million people—nearly all of them children—died of diarrhea, often because they had drunk contaminated water."

"researchers define child mortality as the death of anyone under the age of 5. They use that age because the first five years are the riskiest time of childhood, when kids are the most vulnerable."

"In 1950, some 20 million children died. In 1990, it was down to 12 million children, even though more babies were being born. By 2000, the number had dropped to fewer than 10 million. By 2019, it was below 5 million. Virtually all of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries."

"Around 18 percent of the deaths were caused by non-communicable conditions, such as cancer and cardiovascular problems. The large majority—82 percent—of the deaths were caused by communicable diseases, such as diarrhea and malaria, and health problems that their mothers experienced—and exacerbated by risk factors including malnutrition. (This 18:82 ratio still holds true today.)"

"the largest share of under-5 deaths is among newborns in the first 30 days of life. The chief causes of these neonatal deaths are severe infections and asphyxia—a lack of oxygen to the baby’s brain and vital organs—which are especially dangerous for babies who are born prematurely."

"some of the most effective solutions are as low-tech as you can imagine, such as simply placing a newborn against the mother’s chest immediately after birth"

"pneumonia, the top killer of children who survive the first 30 days. In 2000, it took the lives of more than 1.5 million children, but by 2019, the number was around 670,000"

"Diarrhea is another example of progress. In two decades, its death toll has dropped 58 percent. A key reason is the use of low-tech interventions like oral rehydration solution (sugar water, essentially), which replaces lost electrolytes."

"Between 2010 and 2020, this vaccine prevented more than 200,000 deaths. By 2030, it will have prevented more than half a million deaths."

"Since 2000, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has provided measles vaccines to more than 500 million children—half a billion!—through routine immunization and special vaccination campaigns."

"I knew I wasn’t as sharp when I was operating mostly on caffeine and adrenaline, but I was obsessed with my work, and I felt that sleeping a lot was lazy."

"neglecting sleep undercuts your creativity, problem solving, decision-making, learning, memory, heart health, brain health, mental health, emotional well-being, immune system, and even your life span."

"Does everyone really need seven or eight hours of sleep a night? The answer is that you almost certainly do, even if you’ve convinced yourself otherwise."

"In brief, sleep produces complex neurochemical baths that improve our brains in various ways. And it “restocks the armory of our immune system, helping fight malignancy, preventing infection, and warding off all manner of sickness.” In other words, sleep greatly enhances our evolutionary fitness—just in ways we can’t see."

"Replace any LEDs bulbs in your bedroom, because they emit the most sleep-corroding blue light."

"set your bedroom to drop to 65 degrees at the time you intend to go to sleep. “To successfully initiate sleep … your core temperature needs to decrease by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit,”"

"Limit alcohol, because alcohol is not a sleep aid, contrary to popular belief. While it might help induce sleep, “alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM [rapid-eye-movement] sleep"

"If you can possibly take a short midday nap like our ancestors used to and some Mediterranean and South American cultures still do, you should (but no later than 3 pm). It will likely improve your creativity and coronary health as well as extend your lifetime."

"About 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens underwent a “cognitive revolution,” Harari writes, which gave them the edge over their rivals to spread from East Africa across the planet."

"Harari’s concept of a “cognitive revolution” reminded me of David Christian’s notion in Big History of “collective learning,” how the ability to share, store, and build upon information truly distinguishes us as humans and allowed us to thrive."

"Homo sapiens has the special ability to unite millions of strangers around commons myths. Ideas like freedom, human rights, gods, laws, and capitalism exist in our imaginations, yet they can bind us together and motivate us to cooperate on complex tasks."

"Finally, calling the shift to agriculture a “mistake” overlooks the fact that farming societies were able to specialize, leading to written languages, new technologies, and art—all things we value today."

"The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface—the forerunner of every modern operating system, including Windows."

"Charles eventually joined Microsoft, Windows became the backbone of Microsoft, and the thinking we did after that demo helped set the company’s agenda for the next 15 years."

"The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI since 2016 and was impressed by their steady progress. In mid-2022, I was so excited about their work that I gave them a challenge: train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam."

"In the United States, the best opportunity for reducing inequity is to improve education, particularly making sure that students succeed at math. The evidence shows that having basic math skills sets students up for success, no matter what career they choose."

"But achievement in math is going down across the country, especially for Black, Latino, and low-income students."

"Technically, the term artificial intelligence refers to a model created to solve a specific problem or provide a particular service."

"By contrast, the term artificial general intelligence refers to software that’s capable of learning any task or subject."

"For example, many of the tasks done by a person in sales (digital or phone), service, or document handling (like payables, accounting, or insurance claim disputes) require decision-making but not the ability to learn continuously."

"Corporations have training programs for these activities and in most cases, they have a lot of examples of good and bad work. Humans are trained using these data sets, and soon these data sets will also be used to train the AIs that will empower people to do this work more efficiently."

"As computing power gets cheaper, GPT’s ability to express ideas will increasingly be like having a white-collar worker available to help you with various tasks."

"In addition, advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent."

"Company-wide agents will empower employees in new ways. An agent that understands a particular company will be available for its employees to consult directly and should be part of every meeting so it can answer questions."

"But the demand for people who help other people will never go away. The rise of AI will free people up to do things that software never will—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example."

"Global health and education are two areas where there’s great need and not enough workers to meet those needs. These are areas where AI can help reduce inequity if it is properly targeted."

"For one thing, they’ll help health-care workers make the most of their time by taking care of certain tasks for them—things like filing insurance claims, dealing with paperwork, and drafting notes from a doctor’s visit."

"The AI models used in poor countries will need to be trained on different diseases than in rich countries."

"Similarly, governments and philanthropy should create incentives for companies to share AI-generated insights into crops or livestock raised by people in poor countries."

"AIs can help develop better seeds based on local conditions, advise farmers on the best seeds to plant based on the soil and weather in their area, and help develop drugs and vaccines for livestock."

"Computers haven’t had the effect on education that many of us in the industry have hoped."

"There have been some good developments, including educational games and online sources of information like Wikipedia, but they haven’t had a meaningful effect on any of the measures of students’ achievement."

"It will know your interests and your learning style so it can tailor content that will keep you engaged."

"AIs will need to be trained on diverse data sets so they are unbiased and reflect the different cultures where they’ll be used. And the digital divide will need to be addressed so that students in low-income households do not get left behind."

"There are other issues, such as AIs giving wrong answers to math problems because they struggle with abstract reasoning."

"Other concerns are not simply technical. For example, there’s the threat posed by humans armed with AI."

"Superintelligent AIs are in our future. Compared to a computer, our brains operate at a snail’s pace: An electrical signal in the brain moves at 1/100,000th the speed of the signal in a silicon chip"

"Artificial intelligence still doesn’t control the physical world and can’t establish its own goals."

"Three books have shaped my own thinking on this subject: Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom; Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark; and A Thousand Brains, by Jeff Hawkins."

"For example, companies are developing new chips that will provide the massive amounts of processing power needed for artificial intelligence. Some use optical switches—lasers, essentially—to reduce their energy consumption and lower the manufacturing cost."

"Ideally, innovative chips will allow you to run an AI on your own device, rather than in the cloud, as you have to do today."

"But one big open question is whether we’ll need many of these specialized AIs for different uses—one for education, say, and another for office productivity—or whether it will be possible to develop an artificial general intelligence that can learn any task. There will be immense competition on both approaches."

"First, we should try to balance fears about the downsides of AI—which are understandable and valid—with its ability to improve people’s lives."

"Second, market forces won’t naturally produce AI products and services that help the poorest. The opposite is more likely."

"Although we shouldn’t wait for this to happen, it’s interesting to think about whether artificial intelligence would ever identify inequity and try to reduce it."

"Do you need to have a sense of morality in order to see inequity, or would a purely rational AI also see it? If it did recognize inequity, what would it suggest that we do about it?"