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He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
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The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century.
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Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths.
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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.
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Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
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One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.
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The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
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"Poor humans; they will all die."
"Poor us; we will not."
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The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.
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The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
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I have come to kill you.
The death's heads shrugged. You have come to try.
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If during the last thousand seconds you have received any High-Beyond-protocol packets from "Arbitration Arts," discard them at once. If they have been processed, then the processing site and all locally netted sites must be physically destroyed at once. We realize that this means the destruction of solar systems, but consider the alternative. You are under Transcendent attack.
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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
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Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such—and those living more peaceably around them—we say look out on the universe. It 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 cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.
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If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
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We can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.
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Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
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I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is...
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Peregrine Wickwrackscar was flying. A pilgrim with legends that went back almost a thousand years—and not one of them could come near to this!
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Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.
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It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
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We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.
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Hexapodia as the key insight...
I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs?
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"Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots."
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The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as long as all the time before.
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No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Vernor Vinge
Creative Commons
Born:
October 2, 1944
Died:
March 20, 2024
(aged 79)
Bio:
Vernor Steffen Vinge was a San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author.
Known for:
A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)
A Deepness in the Sky (1999)
Rainbows End (2006)
The Children of the Sky (2011)
The Peace War (1984)
Most used words:
human
life
time
natural
change
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