Quotes from FOGcon 2016

I am cleaning off my desk here, and I figured I might as well type up my favorite quotes from this year's FOGcon panels.

The Developing Reality of Intelligent Machines

"Things break all the time, and we just throw more stuff at them." -- Steven Schwartz, on why he's not worried about a machine intelligence apocalypse

"We don't think like us!" -- Effie Seiberg

"Nigerian scams have nothing on what's coming for us." -- Daniel Starr

"The CEOs are getting smarter, and that's scarier!" -- Karen Brenchley

"There is no commercial application of a baby." -- S. B. Divya

"The software on my phone that navigates me from place to place fortunately did not learn by watching me do it." -- Daniel Starr

"And as for the collapse of human civilization -- I don't know, I've seen worse." -- Effie Seiberg

"I don't know what Google is going to do with what they've learned from [AlphaGo], but I'm sure it will be altruistic and not evil at all." -- Karen Brenchley

Donna Haraway's Honored Guest Presentation

"I'm not totally against babies, as long as they're rare and precious. I think a cap-and-trade system would be great." -- Donna Haraway

Sentience, Science Fiction, and Artificial Intelligence

"Play is that which produces something new." -- Donna Haraway

"[Cockroaches] may not be smarter than a Roomba, but they get a lot more done." -- Jim Lutz

"You don't like all your relatives, but you figure out ways not to kill most of them." -- Donna Haraway

Draconic Appreciation Society

"I read a lot of Victorian children's books when I was a Victorian child in the 1960s." -- Jo Walton

"I think that the dragon comes from the concept of snake translated into a culture that likes drawing swirly things." -- Jo Walton