Greg Egan Quotes

It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.

A person whose skin is metallic can no more have its reproduction restricted than a black-skinned person. Regarding life as a form of machinery and intelligent machines as people without our environmental limitations is essential in understanding FAP, the Final Anthropic Principle, which deals with evolution in the far future.

In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program.

I like to think / it has to be!) / of a cybernetic ecology / where we are free of our labors / and joined back to nature, / returned to our mammal / brothers and sisters, / and all watched over / by machines of loving grace.

Perhaps we can get to the point where we can outsource our own personal experiences entirely into a computer - and possibly our own personality.

Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.

Future generations will know there's nothing mystical about wetware because by 2100, Moore's law will have given us tiny quantum computers powerful enough to upload a human soul.

My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.

You see, I'm also a futurist. I dream about the world 50, 100, maybe even 1,000 years in the future. But I also realize I'm probably not going to see it. However, I wouldn't mind having at least a copy of myself see the future, maybe 50, 100, 1,000 years into the future. It would be a fantastic ride.

As far as what is the line between human and machine? That's a great question.

We can make life in the computer. Granted, it's limited, but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it.

The idea that the mind can extend even beyond the body is an intriguing one, and is bound to become more pressing as we increasingly develop technologies that augment our natural abilities.

Computers are very powerful tools, but in the simulated world of the computer, everything has to be calculated.

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.

Whenever I watch 'The Matrix,' I think that it is possible, but I don't think that it's going to be machines enslaving humans.

Once computers can program, they basically take over technological progress because already, today, the majority of technological progress is run by software, by programming.

I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.

Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.

Robots are great. I am saying that now so that when a future civilization of robots takes us captive, they will search through the 'Guardian' web archive and realise I said, 'Robots are great,' and then they'll choose to save me.

You take fantasies, which for thousands of years belonged to the religious realm - overcoming death or our merging with the universe - and you suddenly start talking about them in a more technical perspective as something that can be achieved, not after you die with the help of supernatural beings, but in this very life with the help of technology.

I used to have the very standard worldview. I can easily identify with people who see computers getting faster and smarter, and technology getting more and more beneficial, without seeing the other side.

'Altered Carbon' is one of the most seminal pieces of post-cyberpunk hard science fiction out there - a dark, complex noir story that challenges our ideas of what it means to be human when all information becomes encodable, including the human mind.

‎By 2100, our destiny is to become like the gods we once worshipped and feared. But our tools will not be magic wands and potions but the science of computers, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and most of all, the quantum theory.

I don't know where the artificial stops and the real starts.