Mark O'Connell Quotes

The culture of the Epic Fail, in its rituals of comic sacrifice, is a culture of sublimated predation.

I'd begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.

When, some months later, Zoltan emailed me about his decision to run for president, I immediately called him. The first thing I asked was what his wife thought of the plan.

"Well, in a way," he said, "it was Lisa who gave me the idea. Remember how I said she wanted me to do something concrete, get some kind of a proper job?"

"I do," I said. "Although I'm guessing running for president on the immortality platform was not what she had in mind."

"That's correct," he confirmed. "It took a little while for her to come around to the idea."

"How did you break it to her?"

"I left a note on the refrigerator," he said, "and went out for a couple hours.

In this messianic vision, machine intelligence will come to redeem the universe of its incalculable stupidity. He takes a goal-oriented approach to cosmology, imposing upon the universe itself a kind of corporate project-management structure, composed of a series of key deliverables across deep time.

The idea of whole brain emulation - which was, in effect, the liberation from matter, from the physical world - seemed to me an extreme example of the way in which science, or the belief in scientific progress, was replacing religion as the vector of deep cultural desires and delusions.

when he first got electromagnets implanted in his fingertips allowing him to sense magnetic fields, he did not suddenly feel exhilarated by his newly expanded sensory capabilities, as most people had assumed he would. "What I felt," he said, "was terrified. I was like, these things are fucking everywhere, and we can't see shit. We are totally fucking blind." "Exactly," said Marlo. "We can't even see X-rays. I mean, how lame is that?" But

I recalled with some discomfort that the man driving the vehicle had invented the sport of volcano boarding, presumably as a way of solving, in one deft move, the problems of the insufficient riskiness of both snowboarding and hanging out on the slopes of active volcanoes. Although I was not sure that I wanted to live forever, I was sure that I didn't want to go down in a blaze of chintzy irony, plunging into a ravine strapped into the passenger seat of a thing called the Immortality Bus.

This is one of the problems with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction.

Humans, after all, weren't actively hostile toward most of the species we'd made extinct over the millennia of our ascendance; they simply weren't part of our design. The same could turn out to be true of superintelligent machines, which would stand in a similar kind of relationship to us as we ourselves did to the animals we bred for food, or the ones who fared little better for all that they had no direct dealings with us at all.

Its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent

This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things.

Sometimes by simply sharing ourselves we become pillars for other people

The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.

Irony is a treacherous servant; unless it's very carefully watched over, it has a tendency to expose the foolishness of its apparent master.

These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don't imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.

The robot successfully dismounted the car, proceeding at a slight crouch, and with exaggerated caution, toward the door; these movements it performed in the manner of a prodigiously shitfaced man intent on demonstrating that he had only had a couple of sherries with dinner.