Vernor Vinge Quotes
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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
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Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and least expensive manipulation of all.
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Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
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'Poor humans; they will all die.''Poor us; we will not.'
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And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.
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The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
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Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.
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Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
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He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
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In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.
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The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.
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Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.
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But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
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How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
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When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.
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Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
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It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.
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But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.
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Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.
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When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
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I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.
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Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
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'Well, what do you know,' Pham said. 'Butterflies in jackboots.'
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The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.