She returned his salute with a sly smile—a rare enough event that he eyed her suspiciously.“Admiral Solo, are you wearing a shit-eating grin because we won here today, or is there something else I should know?”“There’s something else you should know.

— G.S. Jennsen

She skidded around a corner, slamming her shoulder into the wall and bouncing off of it without slowing. Caleb? Silence. Forty-six meters. A long stretch of hallway. She pushed faster, harder. Twenty meters. She burst into the room in unison with a deafening crash of metal shearing metal.

— G.S. Jennsen

Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

The Artificial’s speech pattern was an idiosyncratic mix of awkward and colloquial. It was unexpectedly endearing. “I just have good instincts. Mostly I love being in space.” But you are not ‘in’ space. You are in your starship and your starship is in space. It is not so different from being on a planet. “Oh, Valkyrie, you have no idea.” Tell me then.

— G.S. Jennsen

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.

— Jaron Lanier

The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion.

— Ray Kurzweil

THE LINCOLN HAS ITS SCARS ALSO. MY FINGERPRINTS ACROSS ITS THROAT.

— Amie Kaufman

There were things she wanted to say, but they were all jumbled up in her head and if she tried they’d come out backwards and mixed up and wrong. There were things she needed to say, but she was hanging on by a fraying thread and feared if she tried the thread would break, sending her plummeting alone into the abyss. There were things she would have to say, but they should wait for later. After.

— G.S. Jennsen

The system is only as good as its leaders. When they fail—when the system fails—you better damn well hope I’m there to pick up the slack.” The man’s glower lost some of its fervor. “No one appointed you humanity’s protector.”“No one had to—and if you don’t understand why that is, then you’re not nearly the man I was told you are. I’m leaving now, and I’m going to assume we’re done. But if you threaten me again, you had better bring help.

— G.S. Jennsen