A lot of people, quite frankly, think intense attachments to animals are weird and suspect, the domain of people who can’t quite handle attachments to humans.
For a long time on Earth humans didn’t worship good gods; that’s a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.
We’ll all die out eventually. Humans will be gone. And all I’m saying is, when people worry about polar bears disappearing or whatever, it’s like, ‘Well that’s life, things will come and go, we’ll find new species.’
Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.
We see new things all the time. We see new retroviruses out there – which is the category that HIV falls into – and we’re very, very concerned because this is the part of the world where HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans.
It is very unlikely that the genetics of homosexuality will ever devolve to a single factor in humans with such major effects as it has in Drosophila.
Since the beginning of civilization humans have altered our environment and its biology to allow our civilization to thrive – from domesticating plants and animals to building shelter and tools from living organisms.
Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
Loss is something that I think is ultimately the number one struggle for humans.
The Awa are a distinctive-looking, diminutive forest people, smaller than any of the dozen other Amazon tribespeople I have met. Reduced size is adaptive in a rain forest. You can move around more easily and unobtrusively. Not only humans but other species are smaller in rain forests.
It’s essential that we understand things like the free-rider problem, but we also need to understand that, fortunately, humans are a little nicer than economists give them credit for. Some people actually leave money at roadside fruit stands; some people give money to NPR so we can listen to it.
My personal opinion, Suni Williams – I think that when we really leave the planet – we all go as humans, not as people from one country or another. We are humans; we work together. This is our only planet as human beings that we know of. So we all should have an interest in preserving it.
I make short films, little documentaries, about the co-evolution of humans and technology.
If machines do everything well, including allocating capital and resources efficiently, can that be deflationary, can that eliminate poverty? I don’t know. It’s hard to be very optimistic if you look at how humans have behaved historically.
And introduce an element of cynicism and darkness into it and just realize that we’re all vulnerable. We are humans. There is a finite end to this life and we’re all going to face it and a little silliness can help.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.
As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners.
We should find inspiration in the senses that already exist and try to copy them and apply them to us. If we compare our senses to the senses of other animals and species that we don’t have, we can get ideas for new abilities that we can adapt to humans by applying cybernetics to the body.
Back in the days of Apollo, sending humans to the moon was the only viable way to get the scientific data we wanted. But now, with our computer and robotics technology, there’s very little an astronaut can do on Mars that a well-designed rover can’t.
We are all quick to point out all the differences but not as willing to accept what bonds us as humans.
Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better.
Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth’s environment.
I think vampires are different from human beings, but they’re sentenced to eternity on this planet. They have the same confusion about love and permanence, integrity, and denial. These qualities really are the same in vampire characters as in humans. I think they’re universal themes.
I have three sons, as different from each other as any three humans could be but connected by their shared love of Guitar Hero. I’m lucky to be married to a man I can call my soulmate without any irony whatsoever.
We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.
Fifty years after humans landed on the moon for the first time, America has driven a golden spike on the trail to new space exploration feats through the work of our commercial partner SpaceX and all of the dedicated and talented flight controllers at NASA and our international partners.
We humans absorb a lot of negativity in this world, but dogs are pure joy.
With sufficient water on the Moon, solar energy can be used to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is, of course, critical for humans to breathe and the water important for us to drink.
I know we’ve had AI films, but they’ve been quite specific in their scope. The scope of ‘Humans’ is a world set up where this technology is universally accepted. I haven’t seen anything that’s dealt with it in that multi-layered, every-layer-of-society way.
I am a member of the human race. There’s a certain irony about the cyberworld. You don’t know who is talking to you, if it’s a machine, so I tend to try to reach out to those fellow humans.
People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good. People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.
I’ve seen ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ about 25 times each, so I like all kinds of movies, but I’m drawn, as an actor, to dramas about humans living lives I can relate to.
Humans make mistakes.
Some people are uncomfortable with the idea that humans belong to the same class of animals as cats and cows and raccoons. They’re like the people who become successful and then don’t want to be reminded of the old neighborhood.
In the long term, artificial intelligence and automation are going to be taking over so much of what gives humans a feeling of purpose.
I think that when humans get around to exploring and building cities and towns on Mars, it will be viewed as one of the great times of humanity, a time when people set foot on another world and had the freedom to make their own world.
Humans are extremely good in acquiring new power, but they are not very good in translating this power into greater happiness, which is why we are far more powerful than ever before but we don’t seem to be much happier.
I think people like to see the lives of artists that are legends. They always go through the dark periods and I think just as humans we like to see that and them coming out of it. I love those kinds of movies.
Yes, sir, no, sir, clock in, clock out. Why were you late? Why are you not in today? That’s not how humans are supposed to live.
Humans are the big thing that cause damage in life – in war or whatever – and if I can get away from that and into a wilderness situation, I’m OK. You can more or less live on your own merit.
There’s a lot that machine learning can’t do that humans can do very, very well.
Zombies are apocalyptic in nature. They belong to a class of monster that doesn’t just hunt humans, but seeks to obliterate that entire human race.
Americans mostly now believe the climate is changing. They believe that humans are causing it, and they believe that it is a risk. But in surveys, Americans are not willing to pay higher energy prices to tackle the problem.
In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks.
Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.
We say, ‘You may drink at the age of 21 but not at the age of 20.’ Why? Because humans like to create terribly neat categories out of nature because it allows us a nice, tight social organization. The truth is, nature doesn’t care that we like nice, neat social organizations. Nature likes variety.
Human rights are not a privilege granted by the few, they are a liberty entitled to all, and human rights, by definition, include the rights of all humans, those in the dawn of life, the dusk of life, or the shadows of life.
Anything that’s made by humans is about humans, whether it’s about gods or aliens or anything; it’s about some sort of expressive nature about us.
Chimps don’t have language. Humans actively instruct others about how things should be done. Chimpanzees probably pick up cultural traditions by observation.
