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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
Inside
Happy
Automatons
Trivial
Running
Programs
Self
Illusion
Never
Guess
Program
Awareness

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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
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IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.
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He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
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If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
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I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.
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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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Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.
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It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
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I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
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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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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.
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The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
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But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
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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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