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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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Vernor Vinge
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 2
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Waukesha
Wisconsin
Vernor Steffen Vinge
Events
Regarding
Instead
Technological
Sometimes
Optimism
Years
Remove
Think
Twenty
Thinking
Twenties
Comfortable
Rampant
Thousand
Transcendental

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He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
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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.
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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 humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
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Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
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How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
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Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
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It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
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Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.
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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.
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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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I have come to kill you.The death's heads shrugged. You have come to try.
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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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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?
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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
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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, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.
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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.
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Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.
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Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
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