My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.

It's possible, without taking sides or playing the statesman game, to reduce destruction simply by reducing the development of technology of destruction.

Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that.

The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic,” the New York Times tech columnist once wrote. “Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.

Siren Servers are narcissists; blind to where value comes from, including the web of global interdependence that is at the core of their own value.

There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.