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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
Avalanches
Largest
Small
Even
Things
Avalanche
Triggered

More quotes by 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
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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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If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
Vernor Vinge
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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.
Vernor Vinge
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Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.
Vernor Vinge
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We're endangered by our own success.
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
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Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.
Vernor Vinge
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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.
Vernor Vinge
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The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
Vernor Vinge
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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.
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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We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.
Vernor Vinge
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He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
Vernor Vinge
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How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
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 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.
Vernor Vinge
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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.
Vernor Vinge
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I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
Vernor Vinge
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When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.
Vernor Vinge