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

More quotes by Vernor Vinge

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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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Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.
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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.
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Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
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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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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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I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.
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So much technology, so little talent.
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The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
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What we have is a data glut.
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I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.
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We're endangered by our own success.
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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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It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
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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 have come to kill you.The death's heads shrugged. You have come to try.
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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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But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural 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.
Vernor Vinge