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We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.

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
Competition
Regard
Millions
Makes
Light
Baggage
Humans
Evolutionary
Years
Deadly

More quotes by Vernor Vinge

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We're endangered by our own success.
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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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I have come to kill you.The death's heads shrugged. You have come to try.
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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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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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Well, what do you know, Pham said. Butterflies in jackboots.
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Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
Vernor Vinge
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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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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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The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
Vernor Vinge
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But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
Vernor Vinge
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Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.
Vernor Vinge
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Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
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Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.
Vernor Vinge
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When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.
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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.
Vernor Vinge
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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.
Vernor Vinge
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Poor humans they will all die.Poor us we will not.
Vernor Vinge
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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?
Vernor Vinge
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Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.
Vernor Vinge