Best 52 quotes of Vernor Vinge on MyQuotes

Vernor Vinge

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    Vernor Vinge

    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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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

    Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.

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    Vernor Vinge

    Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

    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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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    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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    Vernor Vinge

    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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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    So much technology, so little talent.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.

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    Vernor Vinge

    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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    Vernor Vinge

    The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.

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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots.

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    Vernor Vinge

    We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.

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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

    What we have is a data glut.

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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.

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    Vernor Vinge

    Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

    So High, So Low, So Many Things to Know

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    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.

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    Vernor Vinge

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

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    Vernor Vinge

    Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality.