The Singularity/Quotes

"Iwakura, Yasuo: Let me give you one little warning. Lain Iwakura: Huh? Iwakura, Yasuo: When it's all said and done, the Wired is just a medium of communication and the transfer of information. You mustn't confuse it with the real world. Do you understand what I'm warning you about? Lain Iwakura: You're wrong. Iwakura, Yasuo: Huh? Lain Iwakura: The border between the two isn't all that clear. I'll be able to enter it soon. In full range. Full motion. I'll translate myself into it. Iwakura, Yasuo: Even with a top of the line civilian Navi, you couldn't. Lain Iwakura: I can do it. I've modified mine. Iwakura, Yasuo: A Psyche processor, huh? But... Lain Iwakura: Don't worry. I'm still me. Iwakura, Yasuo: Sometimes I wonder."

- Serial Experiments Lain

""The time has come to cast aside these bonds and to elevate our consciousness to a higher plane. It is time to become a part of all things!""

- The Puppet Master, Ghost in the Shell

""As distances vanish and the people can flow freely from place to place, society will cross a psychological specific heat boundary and enter a new state. No longer a solid or liquid, we have become as a vapor and will expand to fill all available space. And like a gas, we shall not be easily contained.""

- Sister Miriam Godwinson, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

""We have reached an informational threshold which can only be crossed by harnessing the speed of light directly. The quickest computations require the fastest possible particles moving along the shortest paths. Since the capability now exists to take our information directly from photons travelling molecular distances, the final act of the information revolution will soon be upon us.""

- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

""In a few years, it will all be over, and the human race will have divided in twain. There is no way back, and no future for the world you know. All the hopes and dreams of your race are ended now. You have given birth to your successors, and it is your tragedy that you will never understand them--will never even be able to communicate with their minds. [...] You will not think them human, and you will be right.""

- Karellen, Childhood's End

""there's a special kind of nerd though, who thinks computers will overtake humanity in thirty years, changing humanity in ways incomprehensible to us now, ignoring the third of the world without electricity. so the singularity is the nerd way of saying "in the future being rich and white will be even more awesome." it's flying car bullshit: surely the world will conform to our speculative fiction, surely we're the ones who will get to live in the future, it gives spiritual significance to technology developed primarily for entertainment or warfare, and gives nerds something to obsess over, that isn't the crushing vacuousness of their lives""

- Pictures for Sad Children, giving a slightly more negative view

""I have had it. I have had it with crack houses, dictatorships, torture chambers, disease, old age, spinal paralysis, and world hunger. I have had it with a planetary death rate of 150,000 sentient beings per day. I have had it with this planet. I have had it with mortality. None of this is necessary. The time has come to stop turning away from the mugging on the corner, the beggar on the street. It is no longer necessary to look nervously away, repeating the mantra: "I can't solve all the problems of the world." We can. We can end this.""

- Eliezer Yudkowsky, in counterpoint

"''"Singularitarians are the munchkins of the real world. We just ignore all the usual dungeons and head straight for the cycle of infinite wish spells.'"""

- Eliezer Yudkowsky

"Yet even now, far from the forbidden depths of core space, there remain the relics of the Mandate and their AI-forged marvels. Some of these miraculous artifacts can be found on castaway Mandate Fleet ships, while others were smuggled out by exiles granted one last gift of aid by the Maestros. Amid the ash and bone of the tomb worlds, there still glints the strange beauty of the Mandate’s final workings, and sometimes bold explorers stumble across such devices as human minds were never meant to wholly understand. [. . .]   Figuring Out Mandate Tech Late-era Terran technology was often designed by the Maestros, and the nanofabs used by those hyper-intelligent AIs had remarkably few limits on the physical configuration or appearance of their creations. Design was often based on aesthetic considerations that are completely outside the lexicon of modern post-Silence users, or obscure universal constants that only the cold minds of the Maestros could begin to comprehend. Some pieces of advanced Terran technology can easily be mistaken for works of art rather than practical tools."

- Stars Without Number, Mandate Archives: The Dust