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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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And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.
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Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
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Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
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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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Poor humans they will all die.Poor us we will not.
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I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.
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Well, what do you know, Pham said. Butterflies in jackboots.
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When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.
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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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Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.
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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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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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Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.
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So much technology, so little talent.
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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
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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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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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We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
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The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
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The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.
Vernor Vinge