Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

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.

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

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.

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.

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.