Unstable Equilibrium Quotes

The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that if you can improve intelligence even a little, the process accelerates. It's a tipping point. Like trying to balance a pen on one end - as soon as it tilts even a little, it quickly falls the rest of the way.

Life is like a cobweb, not an organization chart.

The attempt to combine wisdom with power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

No form remains permanently in a substance; a constant change takes place, one form is taken off and another is put on.

It's a lot of random situations that combine in a certain volatile form and create a bigger-than- the-whole situation that nobody could have predicted.

Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.

A scale is only in balance for a brief second. Inevitably the pendulum swings. It's impossible to maintain.