Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Vernor Vinge
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 2
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Waukesha
Wisconsin
Vernor Steffen Vinge
Pain
Levers
Best
Manipulation
Sometimes
Elegant
Deception
Expensive
Terror
Works
Least

More quotes by Vernor Vinge

Image
But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
Vernor Vinge
Image
Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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
Image
Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.
Vernor Vinge
Image
The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
Vernor Vinge
Image
Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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
Image
How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
Vernor Vinge
Image
Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.
Vernor Vinge
Image
Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.
Vernor Vinge
Image
Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Poor humans they will all die.Poor us we will not.
Vernor Vinge
Image
The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.
Vernor Vinge
Image
He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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