Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?

Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.

But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.

Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves - apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge - and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers - but not to us as psychologists - because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study.

One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.