Vernor Vinge Quotes

43 quotes in 564 categories

• What we have is a data glut.
• 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…
• Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.
• Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered,…
• Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths.
• Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
• Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
• Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.
• We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.
• All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted…
• The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
• Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.
• We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition…
• Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
• Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider…
• 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.
• We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
• Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
• I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
• 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…

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