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The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.

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
Elite
Domain
Elites
Smaller
Productive
Truly
Fraction
Humanity
Fractions
Work
Steadily

More quotes by Vernor Vinge

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Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
Vernor Vinge
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When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.
Vernor Vinge
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Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.
Vernor Vinge
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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
Vernor Vinge
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So much technology, so little talent.
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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The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
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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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.
Vernor Vinge
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Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
Vernor Vinge
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I have come to kill you.The death's heads shrugged. You have come to try.
Vernor Vinge
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But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
Vernor Vinge
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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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I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.
Vernor Vinge
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Poor humans they will all die.Poor us we will not.
Vernor Vinge
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We're endangered by our own success.
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.
Vernor Vinge
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What we have is a data glut.
Vernor Vinge
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Well, what do you know, Pham said. Butterflies in jackboots.
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