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Peter Watts (author) -
Blindsight (2006)
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What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?
Peter Watts
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.
Peter Watts
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Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.
Peter Watts
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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
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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
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Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don't want to admit we were left behind.
Peter Watts
Quote of the day
In England, the profession of the law is that which seems to hold out the strongest attraction to talent, from the circumstance, that in it ability, coupled with exertion, even though unaided by patronage, cannot fail of obtaining reward.
Charles Babbage
Peter Watts
Creative Commons
Born:
January 25, 1958
(age 66)
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