Vernor Vinge

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

“You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering.”

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

“The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.”

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

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

“Here and there amidst the wreckage, she found advanced devices that more or less still functioned. With one exception, she’d revealed these to Johanna and then to Woodcarver, and—after it was founded—to the Executive Council. Ravna had kept her mouth shut about the surveillance suite; she and the Children were trapped on a world of medieval strangers....So at the beginning Ravna had kept some secrets. It was now years too late to reveal this one. In the Beyond, “cameras” were more than what early tech civilizations imagined. Cameras could be a coat of paint, or critters that looked like insects, or even a bacterial infection. Delivery of the information to the observer could be even stranger, a diffuse cloud of perturbations—acoustic, visual, thermal—that took enormous processing to reconstruct.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.”

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

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”