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Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.

Vernor Vinge

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Vernor Vinge
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 2
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Waukesha
Wisconsin
Vernor Steffen Vinge
Triggered
Avalanches
Largest
Small
Even
Things
Avalanche

More quotes by Vernor Vinge

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The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.
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If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
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Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
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I have come to kill you.The death's heads shrugged. You have come to try.
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I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.
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We're endangered by our own success.
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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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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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Poor humans they will all die.Poor us we will not.
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Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
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The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
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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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Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.
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Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.
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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.
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It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
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We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.
Vernor Vinge
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The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
Vernor Vinge
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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.
Vernor Vinge