Vernor Vinge
Computer scientist and science fiction author, as well as a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics.
Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.
"Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots."
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?
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.
“I have come to kill you.”
The death’s heads shrugged. “You have come to try.”
Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind—but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
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.
The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.
How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.
So much technology, so little talent.
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...
"Poor humans; they will all die."
"Poor us; we will not."
I say, let’s learn more and then speculate.
The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
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.
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!
The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as long as all the time before.