Travis

“Funny how the experience of one person could have such an impact on billions of others. Pryce wondered what that said about the way the world was run. Nothing good, she was sure of that. All politics is personal, Pryce thought. It turns out all policy is personal, too.”
― Ramez Naam, Apex

“From time to time, I would gaze up at the stars after a night shift and think that they looked like a glowing desert, and I myself was a poor child abandoned in the desert.… I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its “surroundings” in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. “Simulated consciousness” was as oxymoronic as “simulated addition.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“It was a rigorous result in information theory that once you could learn in a sufficiently flexible manner – something humanity had achieved in the Bronze Age – the only limits you faced were speed and storage; any other structural changes were just a matter of style.”
― Greg Egan, Schild’s Ladder