Quotes on AI and wisdom
By Chris Leong @ 2025-11-26T15:55 (+8)
| Excepted from an upcoming post on AI and wisdom |
| But the moral considerations, Doctor... Did you and the other scientists not stop to consider the implications of what you were creating? — Roger Robb When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb— Oppenheimer |
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| There are moments in the history of science, where you have a group of scientists look at their creation and just say, you know: ‘What have we done?... Maybe it's great, maybe it's bad, but what have we done? — Sam Altman |
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| Urgent: get collectively wiser - Yoshua Bengio, AI "Godfather" |
Three Quotes on Transformative Technology 
We stand at a crucial moment in the history of our species. Fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves—severing our entire future and everything we could become.
Yet humanity’s wisdom has grown only falteringly, if at all, and lags dangerously behind. Humanity lacks the maturity, coordination and foresight necessary to avoid making mistakes from which we could never recover. As the gap between our power and our wisdom grows, our future is subject to an ever-increasing level of risk. This situation is unsustainable. So over the next few centuries, humanity will be tested: it will either act decisively to protect itself and its long-term potential, or, in all likelihood, this will be lost forever — Toby Ord, The Precipice
We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology — Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth
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Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct — Nick Bostrom, Founder of the Future of Humanity Institute, Superintelligence
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If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used…There is a tendency to believe that every increase in power means “an increase of ‘progress’ itself ”, an advance in “security, usefulness, welfare and vigour; …an assimilation of new values into the stream of culture”, as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such. — Pope Francis, Laudato si'
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The fundamental test is how wisely we will guide this transformation – how we minimize the risks and maximize the potential for good — António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations
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Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins — Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions