Quotes / The Singularity

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 (1995)

"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

"With global warming solved using green nanobots and our energy crisis averted thanks to orbital mirror stations and the space elevator, everyone has access to full brain upload and download. Money is no longer a thing we concern ourselves with and we are all able to become the beautiful Asian women we have always wanted to be."

— Zack Parsons, giving a decidedly negative view

"As I see it, the main problem in designing a plausible 23rd century these days isn't lack of grandeur, it's the imminence of changes so fundamental and unpredictable they're likely to make the dramas of 2298 as unintelligible to us as the Microsoft Anti-Trust Suit would be to Joan of Arc."

— Justin B. Rye

"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

"The post-human condition is banal. It's astounding and eschtalogical and ontological, and full of cosmic wonder, but only by human standards. Because we may become as gods... but that thrill fades fast. That thrill is merely human and parochial. By the new post-Singularity standards, post-humans are just as bored and frustrated as humans ever were. They're not magic. They're still quotidian entities in a gritty, rules-based physical universe. And they will find themselves swiftly and bruisingly brought up against the limits of their own condition... whatever that limit and that condition may be."

— Bruce Sterling, "The Singularity: Your Future As A Black Hole," a speech to the Long Now Foundation, June 11, 2004

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