Writing, To Me, Is Simply Thinking Through

Intelligence Is An Extremely Subtle Concept. It's A Kind Of Understanding That Flourishes If It's Combined With A Good Memory, But Exists Anyway Even In The Absence Of Good Memory. It's The Ability To Draw Consequences From Causes, To Make Correct Inferences, To Foresee What Might Be The Result, To Work Out Logical Problems, To Be Reasonable, Rational, To Have The Ability To Understand The Solution From Perhaps Insufficient Information. You Know When A Person Is Intelligent, But You Can Be Easily Fooled If You Are Not Yourself Intelligent.

Of Course There Are Worlds. Millions Of Them! Every Star You See Has Worlds, And Most Of Those You Don't See.

Surely, If We Take On Thinking Partners - Or, At The Least, Thinking Servants - In The Form Of Machines, We Will Be More Comfortable With Them, And Will Relate To Them More Easily, If They Are Shaped Like Humans. It Will Be Easier To Be Friends With Human-shaped Robots Than With Specialized Machines Of Unrecognizable Shape. And I Sometimes Think That, In The Desperate Straits Of Humanity Today, We Would Be Grateful To Have Nonhuman Friends, Even If They Are Only The Friends We Build Ourselves.

Science Is A Mechanism, A Way Of Trying To Improve Your Knowledge Of Nature. It's A System For Testing Your Thoughts Against The Universe, And Seeing Whether They Match.

Many A Prophecy, By The Mere Force Of Its Being Believed, Is Transmuted To Fact.