The Star Fraction

For we have seen the future – we have by now centuries of experience of the future – and we know it doesn't work.

Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.

Do AIS dream in electric sleep? He hoped it had nanosecond nightmares.

The fact that humans themselves so frequently didn’t treat each other as self-aware beings had misled some of the AIs’ first best minds.

series of increasingly frequent and agitated, but otherwise incomprehensible, bursts of sound

The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living … as Marx said.

there is no God, and you shall have no other gods.

Why do we have to wander around in these invented worlds of our own devising, these false realities that are just clutter, dross, dirt on the lens?—all these beliefs and identities that people throw away their real lives for.

a manifestation of an autonomous artificial intelligence.” “The Watchmaker,

As an alternative to death there’s a lot to be said for it.

Think of it like cryonics,

United, federal, secular and social democratic, a welfare state where you got liberalism shoved down your throat from an early age, with vitamin supplements

all tested on higher animals or human subjects whose voluntary status was distinctly dubious: debtors, crime-bondees, kids who didn’t know what they were getting into, the desperate poor, mercenaries …

the imminent end was unpredictable strengthened the expectation: two thousand years and counting, and still Coming Soon.

fear had seemed genuine. It was there and it was everywhere, in all the fractured cultures; godless or godly, they all had at the back of their minds the insidiously replicating meme which said that one day a system would wake up and say to its creators: “Yes, now there is a God.” Blessed are the Watchmakers, for they shall inherit the earth.

the most reassuringly dangerous bunch of nice people

We could now be at the mercy of”—he put on a voice-over voice—“‘intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic’ that could hijack every piece of hardware that has any connection with the global comm networks. In short, everything. Mankind: the complete works. On disk.” “Cheerful bastard, aren’t you?” “Yes, I am! Because the whole goddamn datasphere is meaningless without humans doing things with it.

many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists.

anybody who held a Party or a programme, a political project spanning centuries, as their highest value was perfectly capable of lying in their teeth. If you could die for something you could lie for it.

There are some men,” she intoned, “that Things were not meant to know.

Where did it come from?

Goin to meet the Watchmaker goin to meet the man goin to see the wizard.

The sunlight bounced off the concrete paving slabs and hurt his eyes. He flipped the glades down. Colors stayed vivid: the garish yellow-brown of the withered grass, the blinding gray of the concrete, the booming silver overcast through which the sun burned like its tiny burning-glass image through paper. Placing one foot in front of the other became difficult, complicated, tricky, an awkward business, more than he’d bargained for, a whole new belt of slugs. Worse, associational chains kept echoing away in his head, amplifying and distorting, repeating and refining—no, that wasn’t quite it …

move on from the naive fundamentals that were enough for the pew-ballast to the more sophisticated understanding necessary to protect that very simplicity,

every attempt to abolish the market on a large scale has led to the collapse of industry, his Economic Calculation Argument seems vindicated.

Those who had the most laughs had the last laugh.