Charles Stross Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Charles Stross
[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

Charles Stross
The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'

Charles Stross
Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.

Charles Stross
We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!

Charles Stross
I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

Charles Stross
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

Charles Stross
The turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else.

Charles Stross
A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)

Charles Stross
If we pursue this plan, by late 2006 any two adjacent public CCTV terminals — or private camcorders equipped with a digital video link — will be reprogrammable by any authenticated MAGINOT BLUE STARS superuser to permit the operator to turn them into a SCORPION STARE basilisk weapon. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

Charles Stross
—but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.

Charles Stross
Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.

Charles Stross
Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?
Very long-term—at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can't tax it, they won't understand it.

Charles Stross
Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding. A dry chuckle: I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal's wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.

Charles Stross
Manfred decides that he's going to do something unusual for a change: He's going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition—his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games.

Charles Stross
Democracy 2.0. He shudders briefly. I'm not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent.

Charles Stross
Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

Charles Stross
Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death—with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights—will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.

Charles Stross
'Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed,
The transom was shut, the staff home in repose;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
But St. Nicholas won’t be coming because this is a Designated National Security Site within the meaning of Para 4.12 of Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act (Amended) and unauthorized intrusion on such a site is an arrestable offense...

Charles Stross
I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.

Charles Stross
Growing old is natural, growls the old woman. When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever.

Charles Stross
In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.

Charles Stross
Can I remember— I remember lots, I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.

Charles Stross
Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.

Charles Stross
But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we'll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that's what happened out past the Böotes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don't we?

Charles Stross