The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

It’s unlikely that any of those natural hazards will do us in within the next 100 years if we’ve already survived 100,000. By contrast, we are introducing, through human activity, entirely new types of dangers by developing powerful new technologies. We have no record of surviving those.

How can we trace out the links between actions that people take today and really long-term outcomes for humanity - outcomes that stretch out indefinitely into the future? I call this effort macrostrategy - that is, to think about the really big strategic situation for having a positive impact on the long-term future. There's the butterfly effect: A small change in an initial condition could have arbitrarily large consequences.

In the next century, we will be inventing radical new technologies - machine intelligence, perhaps nanotech, great advances in synthetic biology and other things we haven't even thought of yet. And those new powers will unlock wonderful opportunities, but they might also bring with them certain risks. And we have no track record of surviving those risks. So if there are big existential risks, I think they are going to come from our own activities and mostly from our own inventiveness and creativity.

The challenge presented by the prospect of superintelligence, and how we might best respond is quite possibly the most important and most daunting challenge humanity has ever faced. And-whether we succeed or fail-it is probably the last challenge we will ever face.

There are some problems that technology can't solve.

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.