Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all – no one's around to write horror stories.

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 heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.

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

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

We 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.

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.