Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
Vernor VingeWe will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.
Vernor Vinge