Max Tegmark

Black-box audits are insufficient for ensuring that an AI is safe and robust. At a minimum, we need white-box audits where the auditor can look inside the AI and learn about how it reasons. Verified source

It opens up entirely new possibilities for things that you can do—where you can go into battle or do a terrorist attack with zero risk to yourself, and you can also do it anonymously, because if some drones show up and start killing people somewhere ... more Verified source (2015)

It might take two weeks or two days or two hours or two minutes. [...] It’s very appropriate to call this an “intelligence explosion”. Unverified source (2022)

I really empathize for them, frankly, because they’re so stuck in this race to the bottom that they just feel an irresistible pressure to keep going and not get overtaken by the other guy. I think that’s why it’s so important to stigmatize the race t... more Verified source (2025)

Our consciousness has to do with information being processed in certain ways and there's no reason whatsoever that machines can't when they do that. Unverified source (2023)

Tough luck for the ants. We want to design AI in the future so that we don't end up being those ants. Unverified source (2015)

if we humans lose control over our society to machines that are much smarter than us, then things can go just as bad for us. Unverified source (2023)

I actually do not think it's a foregone conclusion that we will build AGI [artificial general intelligence] machines that can outsmart us all. Not because we can't … but rather we might just not want to. So why are obsessing about trying to build so... more Unverified source (2025)