17 quotes
Let me always be inquisitive, but never be suspicious.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
But the church as an institution has always been able to derive strength from the evidence when it’s useful and ignore it when it’s not.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
Every form of behavior is compatible with determinism.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the Internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
The rewards will be purely intellectual, and over the long term, will that be enough?
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
Every quality that made a person more valuable than a database was a product of experience.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
When the public interest is involved, finding out what actually happened is important; justice is an essential part of the social contract, and you can’t have justice until you know the truth.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
For him, the keyboard and screen are a miserable substitute for being there, as unsatisfying as a jungle video game would be to a chimpanzee taken from the Congo.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
He was in no position to judge these people. So what if they felt sorry for themselves? Better to wallow in self-pity over nothing than to have actually screwed up your life.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
Even if humanity is not the reason for which the universe was made, I still wish to understand the way it operates. We human beings may not be the answer to the question why, but I will keep looking for the answer to how.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
Much of modern astronomy is promised on the Copernican principle, the idea that we are not at the center of the universe and are not observing it from a privileged position; this is pretty much the opposite of young-earth creationism.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
Exponential regularly releases new versions, advertising each one as being a step closer to the consumer’s dream of AI: a butler that is utterly loyal and attentive from the moment it’s switched on. To Ana this upgrade sequence seems like a walk to the horizon, providing the illusion of progress while never actually getting any closer to the goal.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
“But I still feel like it’s my fault.”
Dana nodded. “We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.”
Exhalation: Stories (2019)
One proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.
Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy.
Exhalation: Stories (2019)