“We’re pushing into deep space now—Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we’ve even got… — Alastair Reynolds
“We’re pushing into deep space now—Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we’ve even got machines in the Oort cloud. That’s where it gets stickier. If we’re going to do anything useful out there, we’ll need smart machines and lots of them. Machines that break right through the existing cognition thresholds, into post-artilect computation. Human-level thinkers that can live with us, be our equals as well as our workers.”
“You’re not sounding any less scary than you were five minutes ago,” Geoffrey said.
“Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines…It’s going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.”
p. 67Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
She worked quickly, but not because she considered the commission beneath her. It was simply the way she always approached her art. Preparation, forethought, hours of meditation, then an explosion of swift and decisive action, like the quick and merciful descent of a sword. Execution, in every sense of the word.
p. 272
“I worry that it’s me they’re really after.”
“You don’t exist. At the risk of wounding your ego, not everyone in the known universe is obsessed with you and your secret history.”
p. 260
We have been clever, and on occasion we have been foolish. For smart monkeys, we can, when the mood takes us, be exceedingly stupid. But it was cleverness that brought us to this point, and it is only cleverness that will serve us from now on.
We have no time for anything else.
p. 562
