Vernor Vinge Quotes - Page 2

It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.

Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.

We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.

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.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.

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.

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.

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.

Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.

Hexapodia as the key insight...I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs?

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.

The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.

I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.

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 the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge....And now revenge was all that life had left for him.

The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.

I have come to kill you."The death's heads shrugged. "You have come to try.

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.

Peregrine Wickwrackscar was flying. A pilgrim with legends that went back almost a thousand years-and not one of them could come near to this!

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.

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.