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.

The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

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.

Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.

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