Vernor Vinge Quotes

I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.

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.

Hexapodia as the key insight

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.

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.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering.

Its agents -- not even
human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the ship's
automation

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.

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.

On this small world, there will be no more real darkness. But there will always be the Dark. Go out tonight, Lady Pedure. Look up. We are surrounded by the Dark and always will be. And just as our Dark ends with the passage of time in a New Sun, so the greater Dark ends at the shores of a million million stars. Think! If our sun's cycle was once less than a year, then even earlier our sun might have been middling bright all the time. I have students who are sure most of the stars are just like our sun, only much much younger, and many with worlds like ours. You want a deepness that endures, a deepness that Spiderkind can depend on? Pedure, there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever.

What we have is a data glut.

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.

Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.

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.

Ty or Ra or Thect

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.

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.

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.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.

Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle.

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

If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.

[The Universe] does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that can not be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.

Where the surf meets the shore – lots of neat things can happen there.

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.

We're endangered by our own success.

Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.

This might be one of the few basements in Southern California, but it was clearly being used the way Juan's family used the garage.

IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.

Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.

It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.

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.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

So High,
So Low,
So Many Things to Know

Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

For where there is heaven, there can also be hell.

Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.

We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.

The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as
long as all the time before

Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths.

How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?

Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time.

Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.

They had been at the center of something vast, but as usual with the affairs of the Powers, no one knew quite what had happened, nor the result of the strivings.
A Fire Upon the Deep

This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world itself could kill you. And

Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.

I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.

This was a commercial situation, not some exercise in an Applied Theology course.

So much technology, so little talent.

Fong's obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards. So what to look

I think the Mailman is taking us on one at a time, starting with the weakest, drawing us in far enough to learn our True Names - and then destroying us.

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don't always get what you thought you were asking for.

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.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.

Now on Tines World, the Zone physics was still improving. What was it like thirty lightyears higher? Bili

Though his invention worked superbly [ ... ] his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end.