Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundre… - Marvin Minsky

‘In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable... Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets... I have warned [people in the Pentagon] again and again that we are getting into very dangerous country. They don’t seem to understand.

This book... too, is a society — of many small ideas. Each by itself is only common sense, yet when we join enough of them we explain the strangest mysteries of mind.

Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.