Top 20 Quotes of Vernor Vinge:
✶ Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
✶ We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.
✶ Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.
✶ Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
✶ 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.
✶ I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
✶ But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
✶ The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
✶ If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
✶ I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.
✶ I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
✶ Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
✶ How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
✶ 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.
✶ So much technology, so little talent.
✶ We're endangered by our own success.
✶ Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding.
✶ 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.
✶ 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.
✶ Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.
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🖎 Author: Vernor Vinge
♛ Career: Computer Scientist
📅 Life: b. October 2, 1944
🏷 #quotes_Vernor_Vinge, #quotes__World, #quotes_
