David Wong Quotes

Most near-future fictions are boring. It's always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy.

We have lost our vision for the future. Before, we say, 'Nothing will be the same. Cars will fly, and we go to the end of the universe.' We have this kind of naive but exciting idea of the future. Now, the vision has been reduced to ways to select our garbage and how to survive global warming.

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well.

As a kid, I didn't need to be convinced the future promised peril and oppression, so when I started thinking up the middle-grade science fiction novel that became 'The Boy at the End of the World,' it seemed only natural to build the story around a dark vision of the future. In my book, civilization has nearly destroyed itself.

There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future.

I am super optimistic about the near-term prospects of AI because every time there is a technological disruption, it gives us the opportunity of making the world a little different.

My philosophy is that the digital revolution will make mankind happier and more productive, and that won't change over the next 300 years. If you don't stick to that original philosophy, even perfect control of a bunch of companies isn't going to do you any good.

I'll say this: I'm not so sure 'The Jetsons' had it so wrong.

We see incredible opportunity to solve some of the biggest social challenges we have by combining high-performance computing and AI - such as climate change and more.

My obsession is with technology and how it can improve human life. In my view, what we have seen in the last 300 years is only a trailer.

In some ways, technology keeps on enhancing us, and we embrace it.

Mankind had the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and now this third one, the information revolution.

Science fiction always has had strains of pessimism and optimism weaving through its historical development, sometimes one dominating and then the other, usually depending on the state of the world.

I think I'm a person that's very pessimistic about, like I'm not a luddite but I don't think we need to crack the code of technology and bring forth a future techno utopia.

Achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, identifying treatments to diseases like cancer, and harnessing the power of robotics and artificial intelligence to support everyday tasks are all within our grasp. The first country that gives birth to these discoveries will change life as we know it.

Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress.

Technology is the future, I have seen the third industrial revolution, and we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution.

Both climate change and extinction are results of our tyranny over the nonhuman world and our domination of, and exploitation of, whole categories of each other - and those, in turn, are clearly linked to agriculture, the cattle-industrial complex, capitalism.

We need to be at the forefront of technological development again.

As we consider the implications of AI, there is a bright future ahead for countries that invest and participate.

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

Tech can be something that can be great for us. We don't need to fear it.

What I try to focus on is not to try to stop the march of technological progress. Instead, I try to run faster. If Amazon knows you better than you know yourself, then the game is up.