So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.

A lot of movies about artificial intelligence envision that AIs will be very intelligent but missing some key emotional qualities of humans and therefore turn out to be very dangerous.

When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. What now fits in your pocket 25 years from now will fit into a blood cell and will again be millions of times more cost effective.

Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era.

My view is that consciousness, the seat of "personalness," is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights).

Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

There are downsides to every technology. Fire kept us warm, but also burned down our villages.