He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind – but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
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.
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.
Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.
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.
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.
Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.
The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I’ll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
Technical people don’t make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.
Tycoon had a peddler’s talent for using words to redefine reality.
Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
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.
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.
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.
I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.