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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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Vernor Vinge
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 2
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Waukesha
Wisconsin
Vernor Steffen Vinge
Self
Programs
Never
Illusion
Guess
Program
Awareness
Inside
Happy
Automatons
Running
Trivial

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Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.
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I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
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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.
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The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
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Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
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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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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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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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Poor humans they will all die.Poor us we will not.
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I have come to kill you.The death's heads shrugged. You have come to try.
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Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.
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One of his greatest talents was empathy no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.
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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.
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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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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.
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The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
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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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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.
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The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
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Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.
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