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

More quotes by Vernor Vinge

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Poor humans they will all die.Poor us we will not.
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Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
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Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.
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I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
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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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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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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!
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He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
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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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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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He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
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Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
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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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The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
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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 voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.
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.
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Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
Vernor Vinge