It's hard for me to speculate about what motivates somebody like Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk to talk so extensively about AI. I'd have to guess that talking about black holes gets boring after awhile - it's a slowly developing topic.
Israel is a wonderful place to grow up.
Machines and people are both necessary for Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google, and neither is sufficient on its own.
Scientists need the infrastructure for scientific search to aid their research, and they need it to offer relevancy and ways to separate the wheat from the chaff - the useful from the noise - via AI-enabled algorithms. With AI, such an infrastructure would be able to identify the exact study a scientist needs from the tens of thousands on a topic.
An AI utopia is a place where people have income guaranteed because their machines are working for them. Instead, they focus on activities that they want to do, that are personally meaningful like art or, where human creativity still shines, in science.
Netbot was the first comparison shopping company. We realized comparison shopping can be quite tedious if you are driving from one furniture store to another. On the Internet, you can automatically look at a bunch of different stores and see where can you get the best price on a computer or some such thing, so that was the motivation.
