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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
Avalanche
Triggered
Avalanches
Largest
Small
Even
Things

More quotes by Vernor Vinge

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I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
Vernor Vinge
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We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.
Vernor Vinge
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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.
Vernor Vinge
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The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
Vernor Vinge
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When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.
Vernor Vinge
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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!
Vernor Vinge
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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.
Vernor Vinge
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The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.
Vernor Vinge
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Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
Vernor Vinge
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The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
Vernor Vinge
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One of his greatest talents was empathy no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.
Vernor Vinge
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We're endangered by our own success.
Vernor Vinge
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Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.
Vernor Vinge
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So much technology, so little talent.
Vernor Vinge
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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.
Vernor Vinge
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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 to villainy or good, but which simply is.
Vernor Vinge
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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.
Vernor Vinge
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Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
Vernor Vinge
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We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.
Vernor Vinge
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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?
Vernor Vinge