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Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

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
Good
Slaves
Things
Technical
People
Cooperation
Apart
Slave
Fall
Without
Make
Wholehearted

More quotes by 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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We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
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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Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
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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The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
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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Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.
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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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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Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
Vernor Vinge
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But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
Vernor Vinge
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He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
Vernor Vinge
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The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
Vernor Vinge
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What we have is a data glut.
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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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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Well, what do you know, Pham said. Butterflies in jackboots.
Vernor Vinge
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I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
Vernor Vinge
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Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
Vernor Vinge