Vernor Vinge Quotes & Sayings

Ravna became a librarian. "The ultimate dilettante!" Lynne had teased. — Vernor Vinge

So High,
So Low,
So Many Things to Know — Vernor Vinge

Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage. — Vernor Vinge

I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. — Vernor Vinge

Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear. — Vernor Vinge

So much technology, so little talent. — Vernor Vinge

Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality. — Vernor Vinge

Hexapodia as the key insight — Vernor Vinge

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project. — Vernor Vinge

welts long enough for them to grow eyes. Nature does indeed prefer that cobblies be created right before the Dark. — Vernor Vinge

The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat. — Vernor Vinge

[He] was an insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had become. — Vernor Vinge

The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. — Vernor Vinge

What we have is a data glut. — Vernor Vinge

Fong's obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards. So what to look — Vernor Vinge

Peregrine Wickwrackscar was flying. A pilgrim with legends that went back almost a thousand years-and not one of them could come near to this! — Vernor Vinge

You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering. — Vernor Vinge

In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds. — Vernor Vinge

Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently. — Vernor Vinge

All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge ... And now revenge was all that life had left for him. — Vernor Vinge

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. — Vernor Vinge

How long must a fish study to understand human motivation? — Vernor Vinge

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. — Vernor Vinge

I say, let's learn more and then speculate. — Vernor Vinge

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change. — Vernor Vinge

This might be one of the few basements in Southern California, but it was clearly being used the way Juan's family used the garage. — Vernor Vinge

Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. — Vernor Vinge

The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as
long as all the time before — Vernor Vinge

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience. — Vernor Vinge

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don't always get what you thought you were asking for. — Vernor Vinge

Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a human
civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from every wall,
rebuilding what had been merely superhuman. — Vernor Vinge

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories. — Vernor Vinge

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. — Vernor Vinge

He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe. — Vernor Vinge

It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. — Vernor Vinge

Here and there amidst the wreckage, she found advanced devices that more or less still functioned. With one exception, she'd revealed these to Johanna and then to Woodcarver, and - after it was founded - to the Executive Council. Ravna had kept her mouth shut about the surveillance suite; she and the Children were trapped on a world of medieval strangers.

...

So at the beginning Ravna had kept some secrets. It was now years too late to reveal this one. In the Beyond, "cameras" were more than what early tech civilizations imagined. Cameras could be a coat of paint, or critters that looked like insects, or even a bacterial infection. Delivery of the information to the observer could be even stranger, a diffuse cloud of perturbations - acoustic, visual, thermal - that took enormous processing to reconstruct. — Vernor Vinge

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded. — Vernor Vinge

They had been at the center of something vast, but as usual with the affairs of the Powers, no one knew quite what had happened, nor the result of the strivings.
A Fire Upon the Deep — Vernor Vinge

One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability. — Vernor Vinge

Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding. — Vernor Vinge

Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever. — Vernor Vinge

Ravna thought a moment. "Sysadmin is the usual term," she said. — Vernor Vinge

Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season. — Vernor Vinge

It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing. — Vernor Vinge

We're endangered by our own success. — Vernor Vinge

Even so, Jefri. You recognize that Nevil is evil?" Jefri looked away from her, as if refusing to answer. After a moment, Amdi said, "You know he's evil, Jefri." Finally, — Vernor Vinge

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. — Vernor Vinge

Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths. — Vernor Vinge

While We are out of Touch or How to Survive and Prosper during the Next Thirty Minutes by Your Friend, the Mysterious Stranger — Vernor Vinge

At the Docks' altitude, gravity was still about three-quarters of a gee. Air fountains hung a breathable atmosphere over the middle part of the platform. The day before, she had taken a sailboat across the clear-bottomed sea. That was a strange experience indeed: planetary clouds below your keel, stars and indigo sky above. — Vernor Vinge

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails. — Vernor Vinge

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

Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history. — Vernor Vinge

And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove ... instead of twenty. — Vernor Vinge

Its agents -- not even
human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the ship's
automation — Vernor Vinge

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. — Vernor Vinge

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being. — Vernor Vinge

If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn. — Vernor Vinge

We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light. — Vernor Vinge

Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever. — Vernor Vinge

Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems. — Vernor Vinge

On this small world, there will be no more real darkness. But there will always be the Dark. Go out tonight, Lady Pedure. Look up. We are surrounded by the Dark and always will be. And just as our Dark ends with the passage of time in a New Sun, so the greater Dark ends at the shores of a million million stars. Think! If our sun's cycle was once less than a year, then even earlier our sun might have been middling bright all the time. I have students who are sure most of the stars are just like our sun, only much much younger, and many with worlds like ours. You want a deepness that endures, a deepness that Spiderkind can depend on? Pedure, there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever. — Vernor Vinge

IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is. — Vernor Vinge

Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time. — Vernor Vinge

I have come to kill you."The death's heads shrugged. "You have come to try. — Vernor Vinge

I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt. — Vernor Vinge

Now on Tines World, the Zone physics was still improving. What was it like thirty lightyears higher? Bili — Vernor Vinge

Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart. — Vernor Vinge

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you? — Vernor Vinge

Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots. — Vernor Vinge

We're long on high principles and short on simple human understanding. — Vernor Vinge

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. — Vernor Vinge

Hexapodia as the key insight ... I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs? — Vernor Vinge

Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program. — Vernor Vinge

I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence. — Vernor Vinge

For where there is heaven, there can also be hell. — Vernor Vinge

Poor humans; they will all die.""Poor us; we will not. — Vernor Vinge

Ty or Ra or Thect — Vernor Vinge

The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched. — Vernor Vinge

Though his invention worked superbly [ ... ] his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. — Vernor Vinge

[The Universe] does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that can not be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is. — Vernor Vinge

This was a commercial situation, not some exercise in an Applied Theology course. — Vernor Vinge

Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant. — Vernor Vinge

Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle. — Vernor Vinge

I think the Mailman is taking us on one at a time, starting with the weakest, drawing us in far enough to learn our True Names - and then destroying us. — Vernor Vinge

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all. — Vernor Vinge

The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility. — Vernor Vinge

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace. — Vernor Vinge

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft. — Vernor Vinge

This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world itself could kill you. And — Vernor Vinge

Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood ... and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it. — Vernor Vinge

Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption. — Vernor Vinge

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. — Vernor Vinge