George Dyson Quotes

When you click on a link, you are replicating the string of code that it links to. Replication of code sequences isn't life, any more than replication of nucleotide sequences is, but we know that it sometimes leads to life.

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

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

Our culture already has a number of well known stories about artificial life and non-human intelligence. In 'Exegesis,' I've tried to not only tell a new and engaging story but also to comment on those well known stories through the details of my novel.

And I think it's likely that there will be Data's out there one day. I hope so, if there are, that they all look exactly like me!

As the border between physical and digital gets more permeable, a new kind of literacy emerges. And that literacy is built on a foundation of code - whether it's the codes of letters and words, or the code of bits and algorithms.

Post-human intelligence will develop hypercomputers with the processing power to simulate living things - even entire worlds. Perhaps advanced beings could use hypercomputers to surpass the best 'special effects' in movies or computer games so vastly that they could simulate a world, fully, as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

People are fascinated by robots because they're machines that can mimic life.

So if you're a robot and you're living on this planet, you can do things that you can't do in real life - things that you wished you could do: like fly; like have a car that flies; like have furniture that is alive.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

Robots do not hold on to life. They can't. They have nothing to hold on with - no soul, no instinct. Grass has more will to live than they do.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

As humanity goes online, it's becoming an extremely advanced, large-scale processing unit.

If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.

A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

Computers will be able to do all the mundane tasks in our daily lives.

The research rat of the future allows experimentation without manipulation of the real world. This is the cutting edge of modeling technology.

I can't imagine that life can be replaced with a computer universe. I can't accept it.

The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. Anything else is more complicated. You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it.

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

It won’t be long before we all number synthetic creatures among our friends.

The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.