Vernor Vinge famous quotes

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Mean #Years #Eras

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Space #Understanding #Black

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Flexibility

Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Avalanches #Small Things

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Pain #Deception #Levers

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

#Knowing #Heaven #Pieces

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

#Simple #Long #Understanding

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Evil #Comfort #Twisted

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
-- Vernor Vinge

#Running #Self #Illusion

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

#Fall #People #Cooperation

Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Liars #Once Upon A Time #Mouths

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#People #Use #May

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

#Writing #Stories #Horror

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Thinking #Years #Optimism

He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Believe #Saws #Wanted

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

#Greed #Forever #May

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

#Voice #Hair #Scalpels

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Problem #Passing #Stage

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

#Humanity #Domain #Fractions

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

#Two #Broken #Evil

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

#Intelligent #Creating #People

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Viewpoints #Quails

Poor humans; they will all die.""Poor us; we will not.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Poor #Humans

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

#Trying #Green #Lasts

I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
-- 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!
-- Vernor Vinge

#Years #Flying #Legends

If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Hours

I have come to kill you."The death's heads shrugged. "You have come to try.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Trying

The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Heart #Manipulation

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Jobs #Revenge #Law

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

#Language #Natural #Program

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

#Butterfly #Said #Wells

It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Lying

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?
-- Vernor Vinge

#Keys #Video #Legs

The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Race #Extinction #Possibility

IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Cases

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

#Years #Light #Competition

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Agreement #Mind #Algorithms

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Technology #Understanding #World

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

#Research #Ignored #Notes

What we have is a data glut.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Data

One of his greatest talents was empathy; no ***** can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Perfection #Empathy #Talent

I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Hurt #Faces #Cry

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

#Gun #Mind #Thunder

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

#Ideas #Progress #Corny

I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Change #Earth #Paper

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Writing #Science #Ideas

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

#Profound #Research #Artificial Intelligence

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

#Views #World #Approach

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Singularity #Technological

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Information #Natural #Increase

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Animal #World #Problem

Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Stretching

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.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Technology #Natural #Possibility

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

#Science #Creative #Fiction

So much technology, so little talent.
-- Vernor Vinge

#Technology #Littles #Talent