Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.

In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.

The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.

How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?

IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.

I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.

I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.

We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.

The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.

Sometimes the biggest disasters arent noticed at all no ones around to write horror stories.

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.

So much technology, so little talent.

You shall gain, but you shall pay with sweat, blood, and vomit.

I haven't seen it this busy since I've been an IndyCar driver. So I think that's a great kind of thing that's happening for the IndyCar Series, in general, right now. But it's an event that I'm very proud to be part of. I love it. I can't wait to come back next year.

Whenever you have the creator pulling your card and saying they want you to be a part of it, you're in a pretty good position.

I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.

Life's not about sitting at home in front of the TV waiting for your life to begin. Get out there and take some chances.

The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.

I would definitely say that I am a very big movie musical fan in general, and I try to see every one that I possibly can - and 'Glee' every week.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

Unless you know where you are going then you will not know how to get there.

I think I don't have as much to prove now.

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Technology allows us to do many things, but it is always important to combine it with traditional handcrafts and, in fact, use technology to replicate dying arts so that they are not lost.

If you had found the right candidate in 2000 or 2004, and you could have put that man or woman, given them ballot access in September of the election year, they could have won the election.

To us, there was Bob Dylan, and there was dad. As for what he meant to other people, that was never glorified in our house. There were no accolades there, no gold records.

Taking B12 is the price of getting to be vegan, the way wearing a helmet is the price of getting to ride a motorcycle and giving up alcohol for nine months is the price of getting to have a baby.

I'm a great believer in the experiential theory of writing.

My normal routine is pretty much putting out fires all day.

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

Everything has combined to make my life in New York an amazing experience. I told my manager a few years ago that I wanted to move here and try acting in the theater.

My beliefs are the center of my being.

I always wanted to be on a great TV show and in a Broadway show and have a CD out, and the fact that they happened simultaneously is kind of an embarrassment of riches.

When I was a girl, there wasn't anything in Spanish in the movies until you saw it on DVD.

The danger in being closely knit is becoming miserably entangled.