Geoffrey Hinton

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. ”

Humans are still much better than computers at recognizing speech. ”

The NSA is already bugging everything that everybody does. Each time there's a new revelation from Snowden, you realise the extent of it. ”

The question is, can we make neural networks that are 1,000 times bigger? And how can we do that with existing computation? ”

Everybody right now, they look at the current technology, and they think, 'OK, that's what artificial neural nets are.' And they don't realize how arbitrary it is. We just made it up! And there's no reason why we shouldn't make up something else. ”

Any new technology, if it's used by evil people, bad things can happen. But that's more a question of the politics of the technology. ”

My view is we should be doing everything we can to come up with ways of exploiting the current technology effectively. ”

Machines can do things cheaper and better. We're very used to that in banking, for example. ATM machines are better than tellers if you want a simple transaction. They're faster, they're less trouble, they're more reliable, so they put tellers out of work. ”

The brain sure as hell doesn't work by somebody programming in rules. ”

I had a stormy graduate career, where every week we would have a shouting match. I kept doing deals where I would say, 'Okay, let me do neural nets for another six months, and I will prove to you they work.' At the end of the six months, I would say, 'Yeah, but I am almost there. Give me another six months.' ”