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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.

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
Seems
Lead
Ideas
Took
Find
Months
Percolate
Writing
Fiction
Eighteen
Time
Consciousness
Cultural
Like
Middle
Decades
Easy
Began
Science
Seemed

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I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
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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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Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.
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If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
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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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The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
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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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Well, what do you know, Pham said. Butterflies in jackboots.
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Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.
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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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We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.
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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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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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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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So much technology, so little talent.
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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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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?
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Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.
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One of his greatest talents was empathy no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.
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Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.
Vernor Vinge