"The problem is that in every example we know, a layer that can change fast also can't change very much."

Jaron Lanier Technology See all quotes by Jaron Lanier →

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“The quest to rationally prove the possibility of sentience in a computer is the modern version of proving God's existence. ...eventually a cybernetically minded twenty-first century version of Kant will appear in order to present a tedious "proof" that such adventures are futile.”

“People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience.”

“The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.”

“Digital information is really just people in disguise.”

“The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed was false but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality.”

“If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.”

Resonant Thoughts

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"I want my organic brain to contain vast stores of knowledge and my silicon overmind to contain a stupidly huge amount more."

— Clive Thompson (journalist)

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"Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary — do you hear? Who are you in there?"

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"In a previous paper on progress in general systems research... I avoided the issue of defining a system. I noted that no definitions are satisfactory, and it seemed to me the essence of the subject ar…"

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