Quote

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

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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
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Well, what do you know, Pham said. Butterflies in jackboots.
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But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
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Once upon a time I was such a good liar I could talk the fish right into my mouths.
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Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.
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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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I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
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So much technology, so little talent.
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Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.
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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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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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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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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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The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.
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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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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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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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Poor humans they will all die.Poor us we will not.
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