Vernor Vinge Quotes

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

By the time of the Singularity, there won't be a distinction between humans and technology. This is not because humans will have become what we think of as machines today, but rather machines will have progressed to be like humans and beyond. Technology will be the metaphorical opposable thumb that enables our next step in evolution.

The most human thing about us is our technology.

'The 5th Wave' is sci-fi, but I tried very hard to ground the story in very human terms and in those universal themes that transcend genre. How do we define ourselves? What, exactly, does it mean to be human? What remains after everything we trust, everything we believe in and rely upon, has been stripped away?

And we should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to concepts on the fringe of science fiction. Flaky American futurologists aren't always wrong. They remind us that a superintelligent machine is the last instrument that humans may ever design - the machine will itself take over in making further steps.

How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?

There's, you know, there's an ideology behind Ultron that makes him more unique that just a bad guy. He doesn't wanna just kill the Avengers. He doesn't wanna just destroy the world. He has these monologues and these beautiful speeches that kind of embody a certain mentality about what's wrong with humanity.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.

I think after a time there won't be anything left to be interesting for mankind. Computers are about to do everything for us. Cellphones are smarter than we are. We'll embrace spirituality because we'll be bored of everything else.

I want to see what technology's going to be like in a few hundred years, if the human race hasn't completely obliterated itself by then.

The real world is far too complex and unpredictable to make something like the idea of humanity controlling its own evolution or engineering itself - well, I wouldn't say impossible but it should be approached with a degree of caution.

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

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.

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.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.

People say, like, 'Are you a regular person?' 'Well, I'm not a robot, if that's what you're asking, I really am a person.'

If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone.

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.

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence - in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement - wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.

Our species is on the verge of changes that will fundamentally alter what it means to be human... and we are the people driving that change.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

I think there is a general unrest or curiosity about what a human future is going to be like, and whether the way we're living is even sustainable.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.