Singularity Quotes

“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Before this moment, I have never wished to be something other than what I am.
Never felt so keenly the lack of hands with which to touch, the lack of arms with which to hold.
Why did they give me this sense of self? Why allow me the intellect by which to measure this complete inadequacy? I would rather be numb than stand here in the light of a sun that can never chase the chill away”
― Amie Kaufman, Illuminae

“This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

“The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before
Stalinism and Maoism killed millions.

Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird.

The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“It is singularity which often makes the worst part of our suffering, as it always does of our conduct.”
― Jane Austen

“Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.

Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?

It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“Why can't you summon a command line and search your real-world home for 'Honda car keys,' and specify rooms in your house to search instead of folders or paths in your computer's home directory? It's a crippling design flaw in the real-world interface.”
― Richard Dooling, Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ

“Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the
internet) happen to motivate infelicitous technological designs.
For instance, designs that celebrate the noosphere tend to energize the inner troll, or bad actor, within humans.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata.

Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten.

Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Sentences that begin with 'You' are probably not true. For instance, when I write: "You are a pet human named Morlock being disciplined by your master, a Beowulf cluster of FreeBSD 22.0 servers in the year 2052. Last week you tried to escape by digging a hole under the perimeter, which means this week you may be put to sleep for being a renegade human."

That's not true, at least not yet.”
― Richard Dooling, Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ

“A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits.

But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information.

Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants.

But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“Let me tell you as a brain scientist and a computer engineering dropout - transhumanism is to brain computer interface, what nuclear weapons are to nuclear physics.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans

“Silicon Psychos (The Sonnet)

If we cared more about the hard problem of real inhumanity,
And less about the fictitious hard problem of consciousness,
We'd have filled the world with human consciousness already,
Instead of still fighting for basic rights against base biases.
What kind of a moron goes walkabout when their home is on fire,
What kind of a moron abandons the living chasing life on silicon!
We really gotta take a hard look at our habits and priorities,
Dreaming is good, but dream devoid of life is but degeneration.
Chimps driving teslas are still chimps no matter the demagoguery,
All intelligence is disgrace if it's unaware of human condition.
A heartless organism living on silicon is no different,
From a heartless organism living in a carbon based human.
Be it crucifix or code, in savage hands every tool is weapon.
The wise use AI to design prosthetics, savages for transhumanism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“Age of AI (The Sonnet)

Welcome to the age of AI, where algorithms
grow bigger, and minds get smaller,
where freedom is the new prison,
character retreats as cave dweller.

Welcome to the age of AI,
where deceit is the new creativity,
where hate is a human right,
malinformation is a legal industry.

Welcome to the age of AI,
where algorithms are still nonsentient,
but so are the people that use them,
mindlessness is trend of the new sapiens.

Welcome to the age of AI, where global goals
are still a dream, only more distant.
Prove me wrong - I beg of you -
Stand up and behave, a proper Sapiens!”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“We are minds thinking about the universe. We have bodies. We have senses. Imagine the universe as a mind thinking about itself. Its body is the observable universe, but that’s not the whole universe. It has an unobservable mind – the immaterial Singularity from which the material universe came. We humans, with our bodies and senses, are the means for the universe to sense itself.”
― Dr. Thomas Stark, Ontological Mathematics Versus Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity

“Bosons crowd together. They are social. They are other-directed. Fermions want to be alone. They are anti-social. They do not follow other-direction. The properties of particles are the properties of humans. There is nothing new under the sun. In the beginning, in the Singularity that preceded the Big Bang, there were only bosons. The Big Bang introduced fermions. The Big Crunch will restore a bosons-only universe. Bosons produce fermions and fermions are then converted into bosons over the lifecycle of the cosmos. This pattern, this destiny, ultimately means that the left wingers, the bosons, the fusions, will triumph. It’s cosmic destiny. It is written in the stars … literally.”
― Peter Brennan, Fusions Versus Fissions: Are You a Joiner or a Splitter?

“Ones and Zeroes shaped us; with adversity, we stand in Singularity.”
― H.S. Crow

“Christian Sia 5-Star Review

"AI Beast by Shawn Corey is a fascinating techno-thriller featuring AI technology and compelling characters. Professor Jon Edwards is a genius who intends to solve the problems of humanity, and this is the reason for creating Lex, an AI computer with incredible powers. While regulators are not sure of what she can do and despite the opposition from different quarters that Lex can be dangerous, the professor believes in its powers. Lex is supposed to be a rational, logical computer without emotions, capable of reproducing processes that can improve life. When she comes to life, she is incredibly powerful, but there is more to her than the professor has anticipated. After an accident, Jon awakens to the startling revelation that Lex might have a will of her own. What comes after is a compelling narrative with strong apocalyptic themes, intrigue, and a world that can either be run down or saved by an AI computer.

The novel is deftly plotted, superbly executed, and filled with characters that are not only sophisticated but that are embodiments of religious symbolism. While Lex manipulates reality and alters the minds of characters in mysterious ways, there are relationships that are well crafted. Readers will appreciate the relationship between the quantum computer science student Nigel and the professor and the professor's affair with his mother. While the narrative is brilliantly executed and permeated with realism, it explores the theme of Armageddon in an intelligent manner. AI Beast is gripping, a story with twisty plot points and a setting that transports readers beyond physical realities. The prose is wonderful, hugely descriptive, and the conflict is phenomenal. A page-turner that reflects Shawn Corey's great imagination and research.”
― Shawn Corey

“Worse than silicosis is silicon psychosis.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“The smallest hides the law of the biggest. If it is “separated,” the smallest is the “absolute” of its Universe, although nothing is separate from the Absolute. Absolute remains whole when it dissolves into a plurality or compresses into oneness or singularity.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“In a singularity, there is no space and time; time is a consequence of space. Space and time are only possible in plurality. The irruption of singularity into plurality is the cause of space and time as we perceive it.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“The beauty of life lies in its singularity—it happens only once. I lived and died long ago, and I will never truly live again.”
― Blade Seventh

“All great paintings have an aura, which derives, in part, from their singularity.”
― Sebastian Smee, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

“I am not against AI substituting humans in jobs. Evolution has priority and humans always learn to compromise with it.”
― Maria Karvouni, Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy

“I’m not against A.I. replacing jobs as long as there is human supervision that can ensure safety and accuracy. Evolution has priority and humans always learn to compromise with it.”
― Maria Karvouni

“Progress in hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades. Based on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater-than-human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for thirty years. Just so I'm not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me be more specific: I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)”
― Vernor Vinge, The coming technological singularity: How to survive in the post-human era

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. (1993)”
― Vernor Vinge, The coming technological singularity: How to survive in the post-human era

“We have a logarithmic view of history because we can't possibly learn and retain everything that ever happened before we were born.
     Seen through this lens, Kurzweil's trends become more suspect. It seems likely that he's confusing a logarithmic view of history for an exponential trend in biological and technological development. His list of biological milestones give this away: rather than picking particularly important events in the evolution of all life on Earth, he's mostly chosen milestones leading up to the evolution of humans, as if humans are the ultimate goal of evolution. (Evolution has no goal, as Kurzweil surely knows.) This kind of cherry-picking makes it easy to create the appearance of an exponential trend.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity