Quote

The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.

Vernor Vinge

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Vernor Vinge
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 2
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Waukesha
Wisconsin
Vernor Steffen Vinge
Like
Petting
Scalpels
Hairs
Throat
Gentle
Short
Hair
Voice
Scalpel

More quotes by Vernor Vinge

Image
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
Image
We're endangered by our own success.
Vernor Vinge
Image
I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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
Image
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.
Vernor Vinge
Image
So much technology, so little talent.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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
Image
But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
Vernor Vinge
Image
We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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
Image
How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
Vernor Vinge
Image
Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
Vernor Vinge
Image
Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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.
Vernor Vinge
Image
Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.
Vernor Vinge
Image
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
Image
Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.
Vernor Vinge
Image
Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.
Vernor Vinge