21 Quotes by Jaan Tallinn

Technology keeps progressing. Young people follow the curve. But as they get older, they get inertia, and they start deviating from that curve.

In my view, the fact that computers caught up to humans and completely dominate humans in chess and some other domains already, that says there's evidence that, yes, in principle, they can be better programmers than humans.

Once we have something that is no longer under control, once technological development is yanked out of our hands, it doesn't have to continue to be beneficial to humans.

If you happen to start a new country in the 1990s, you have the advantage of drafting new laws with the knowledge that the Internet is out there.

I used to have the very standard worldview. I can easily identify with people who see computers getting faster and smarter, and technology getting more and more beneficial, without seeing the other side.

Shaming people into being virtuous doesn't change behaviour.

Incentive schemes, whereby people who have done the most good for humanity are rewarded 20 years into the future, would create the expectation that doing long-term good is valuable.

Your evolutionary heuristics come back to the idea of a future roughly similar to what it is now. You give to the community as it is now, to benefit a similar community in the future.

I was born behind the Iron Curtain, and I remember heated discussions about large-scale terra-forming projects, such as reversing the direction of the river Ob or putting up large reflectors into space to heat up Siberia.