I think we should think of AI as the intellectual equivalent of a backhoe. It will be much better than us at a lot of things.

You look at these past predictions like there's only a market in the world for five computers [as allegedly said by IBM founder Thomas Watson] and you realize it's not a good idea to predict too far into the future.

As soon as you have good mechanical technology, you can make things like backhoes that can dig holes in the road. But of course a backhoe can knock your head off. But you don't want to not develop a backhoe because it can knock your head off, that would be regarded as silly.

In deep learning, the algorithms we use now are versions of the algorithms we were developing in the 1980s, the 1990s. People were very optimistic about them, but it turns out they didn't work too well.

I think people need to understand that deep learning is making a lot of things, behind-the-scenes, much better. Deep learning is already working in Google search, and in image search; it allows you to image search a term like "hug."

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. You have about 1,000-trillion synapses - 10 to the 15, it's a very big number.

Any new technology, if it's used by evil people, bad things can happen. But that's more a question of the politics of the technology.