Peter Watts (author) Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

Peter Watts
Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

Peter Watts
Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.

Peter Watts
If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

Peter Watts
Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

Peter Watts
I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit.

Peter Watts
I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain.

Peter Watts
How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?

Peter Watts
Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

Peter Watts
This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

Peter Watts
The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

Peter Watts
Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

Peter Watts
But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.

Peter Watts
You are. I'm just fatalistically cheerful. We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends.

Peter Watts
Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don't want to admit we were left behind.

Peter Watts