Vernor Vinge Quotes

We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.

Technology has outstripped our knowledge of self.

So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.

As Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a 'singularity.'

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.

AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

I'm not afraid of computers taking over the world.

I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.

By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.

Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.

You probably found 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising' in the humor section. Let's just hope that is where it belongs.

I just think there's a general interest in the world of computers.

We have entered an era where the kinds of data and analyses that people run have gotten incredibly complicated. So you have researchers using sophisticated software programs that they probably don't understand but are generally accepted and everyone [in the field] uses.

Everything depends on whether the technological disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be restricted and brought under intellectual, spiritual, moral, and political rule.

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.

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

Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

Artificial Intelligence is one of those areas where we should be proactive in controlling it rather than reactive. If we are reactive, by the time we will do the necessary things, it will be too late. Robots can do everything better than we [humans] can.

We really don't discover fully what 'Westworld' is for this first season, until we get there. The first 10 episodes are the journey. The colors become brighter, the vistas become clearer, and the history is more understood with each step we take along the way.

Computers in general, and software in particular, are much more difficult than other kinds of technology for most people to grok, and they overwhelm us with a sense of mystery.

We can't really know ourselves because we have not created ourselves. But we can know computers, we can know cars, because anything that we made, we can understand.

The future of the world is in the palm of the tech community.

The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.