I am always inspired by Carl Sagal - when he turned Voyager around to take that unforgettable picture of Earth as a pale blue dot in space. Every human war, every love story, every tragedy has happened on this insignificant pixel floating in space. This is the only Earth, the only home that we have. Knowing that there are other species on Earth that can speak, that have language, means that they think and they're conscious. That profoundly changes the way we view ourselves in the world, our role as stewards, and our place in the cosmos. And to me this is the core of what AI offers humanity. In the sense that the telescope let us look out into the patterns of the cosmos and discover that Earth was not at the centre of the universe, AI can be the telescope of our generation, of our era. AI and deep learning are letting us look out at the patterns of the cosmos. And what we're going to discover is that humanity is not the centre of the universe. Perhaps our ego is not yet ready for that, but it's just the breakthrough that could make us a whole lot better as a species.
AZA RASKIN Offscreen magazine interview, Issue 20
