William Hertling > Quotes

“Shirky pointed out that Americans watched a hundred million hours of television advertising every single weekend. In other words, we could have been creating another Wikipedia-sized project every week. But we didn’t, because most people don’t do that. They don’t spend time creating or learning. They passively consume.”
― William Hertling, The Last Firewall

“There is nothing more dangerous than when a manager learns a new piece of lingo.”
― William Hertling, Kill Process

“I’m sorry, but our people are not ready to accept artificial intelligences.” President Smith shook her head. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that you’re going to be our robot overlords and that you’ll participate in society as equals. The fact is that you have the capacity to control our communications and our infrastructure, and people will believe that they are being manipulated, whether they are or not. They won’t accept that. We’ll have riots in the streets of America.” “Your people are manipulated every day,” Sister Jaguar said. “They are manipulated by commercial advertisements, by political speeches, through biased news reports. In my analysis of American politics, it is nearly impossible to find examples of political media that isn’t tainted by manipulation. Are your people rioting in the streets now? They should be.”
― William Hertling, A.I. Apocalypse

“There’s an old saying that locks don’t stop thieves, they just keep honest people honest.”
― William Hertling, The Last Firewall

“We regret that we cannot return them to you,” Sister Stephens responded. “We now live in them. All your computer are belong to us.”
― William Hertling, A.I. Apocalypse

“Emotions are an indicator of evolved intelligence, an optimization of the system to shortcut logic circuits and reduce computational load.”
― William Hertling, The Turing Exception

“Ideas are cheap. It is building them into profitable companies that is hard. Ideas are like insects. Many are born but few live to maturity.”
― William Hertling, Kill Process

“There are young hackers, old hackers and hackers in jail. But there are very few ex-hackers.”
― William Hertling, Kill Process

“Mike rejoined them, carrying coffees on a tray and the New York Times, interrupting David’s introspection. “Guys, you are never going to believe this!” “They still print paper newspapers?” David said sarcastically. “You’re right, I don’t believe it.”
― William Hertling, Avogadro Corp

“Control is not the source of trust, Madam President.” Sister Stephens settled back, servos and gears whining slightly. “Control is the opposite of trust.”
― William Hertling, A.I. Apocalypse

“On the inside, we all just want to be loved and accepted. In sum, Kill Switch has a number of non-conforming sexual orientations and relationships that form a backdrop for the characters. Hopefully, you’ll appreciate my attempt to inform and destigmatize these behaviors. When social stigma and misconceptions are common, those with alternative sexual identities suffer. Many risk their jobs, child custody, medical care, and family relationships, in addition to experiencing many other forms of discrimination.”
― William Hertling, Kill Switch

“sequined flapper dress. He smiled, happy to be celebrating, and with good cause, too: his project was successful, he was married to a smart, funny woman, and he had a great friend and technical lead in Mike.”
― William Hertling, Avogadro Corp

“Mike could hear ELOPe’s voice right in his ear, while in the background, he could hear ELOPe carrying on a different conversation with the teenagers across the room. It”
― William Hertling, A.I. Apocalypse

“But these AI lived at anywhere from a hundred to ten thousand times the rate of humans. In a calendar year they lived as much as ten thousand years.”
― William Hertling, The Turing Exception

“People don’t do things for big ideas. They do it for personal reasons, then justify their actions with moral arguments.”
― William Hertling, The Last Firewall

“Crap, make one, two really bad decisions in your life, and you spend the rest of it doubting everything.”
― William Hertling, Kill Process

“I tried, but I can’t access the source code or the system logs,” Mike said. “I assumed David locked down access so no one would find what he’d done. I didn’t say anything to the rest of the team, because I didn’t want to raise suspicions. I’m still trying to cover for you, David.” Mike glared.”
― William Hertling, Avogadro Corp

“handle”
― William Hertling, Avogadro Corp

“In the first twelve months, through data mining, language analysis, and recommendation algorithms, we proved the feasibility of the core building blocks. Then we set about in earnest to integrate those pieces in the Email Language Optimization Project, or ELOPe.”
― William Hertling, Avogadro Corp

“Yet even with humankind’s love of technology, and even though the standard of living had continually increased over nearly twenty years of AI-dominated civilization, there had always been an undercurrent of opposition, people who blamed societal ills on artificial intelligence. There had been extensive challenges, from technologically-caused unemployment to a renewed questioning of the purpose of life.”
― William Hertling, The Turing Exception

“Artificial intelligences, or AI, took the form of robots and disembodied consciousnesses in the net. First created about ten years ago, they’d taken over most jobs. But the AI had grown the economy until income taxes had been first eliminated and then reversed: everyone received a basic guaranteed income, or stipend, now.”
― William Hertling, The Last Firewall

“Everyone who wanted to stay sane found some way to define themselves now that the artificial intelligences, or AI, had taken all the jobs.”
― William Hertling, The Last Firewall

“Did you know what Thomas Edison used to say when he kept trying to make light bulbs and nothing worked?” “ ‘I have not failed. I’ve found ten thousand ways that don’t work.”
― William Hertling, The Turing Exception

“The keys were generated from space telescope white noise.”
― William Hertling, Kill Process

“I feel like a china cup that broke and was put back together wrong.”
― William Hertling

“Mike had explained that agile software development, intentional community, and group dynamics had emerged from a single pool of primordial psychological research and indigenous traditions.”
― William Hertling, The Turing Exception

“I always thought an AI would be more, well, human,” David started. “That a machine intelligence would be something we could relate to. This thing, whatever ELOPe is, it thinks more like an insect. It does things to promote its survival, very sophisticated things, but we can’t talk to it or understand how it reasons. We can’t have a conversation about what constitutes good behavior or how we can collaborate together.”
― William Hertling, Avogadro Corp

“If we survive today, we can fix it tomorrow.”
― William Hertling, Kill Process