Kevin Warwick - Quotations

Quotations

• “Shouldn’t I join the ranks of philosophers and merely make unsubstantiated claims about the wonders of human consciousness? Shouldn’t I stop trying to do some science and keep my head down? Indeed not”.
• “I feel that we are all philosophers, and that those who describe themselves as a ‘philosopher’ simply do not have a day job to go to”.
• On Human Consciousness: “John Searle put forward the view that a shoe is not conscious therefore a computer cannot be conscious. By the same sort of analogy though, a cabbage is not conscious therefore a human cannot be conscious”.
• On Machine Intelligence: “Our robots have roughly the equivalent of 50 to 100 brain cells. That means they are about as intelligent as a slug or snail or a Manchester United supporter”.
• “An actual robot walking machine which takes one step and then falls over is worth far more than a computer simulation of 29,000 robots running the London Marathon in record time”.
• “When comparing human memory and computer memory it is clear that the human version has two distinct disadvantages. Firstly, as indeed I have experienced myself, due to ageing, human memory can exhibit very poor short term recall”.
• "There can be no absolute reality, there can be no absolute truth".
• "Ask not what the surgeon can do for you – ask what you can do for the surgeon", Panel Discussion on Challenges & Opportunities in Biomedical Engineering at BIOSTEC 2008 Conference, Madeira, Portugal, 28 January 2008.