"Society can serve its citizens only to the extent that it knows them."
- David Marusek
"What a mistake that had been, to create a construct [AI] that could suffer. He knew that now. Life, pain, death, they were no playthings. Biology was serious business, not for amateurs and foolish god..."
"When General Genius built the first mentar [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, ou..."
"Consciousness is the chronic pain of life, and all higher organisms suffer it every waking moment."
"In a thousand years, Fred, no one will even know or care we existed."
"Imagine, Bishop, that you have a beloved cat, but that your cat is not with you. If you close your eyes and further imagine you are petting your cat, the same neurons in your brains are activated as i..."
"Capitalism was a marvel, as long as you were a capitalist."
"Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resourc..."
"Be they pharaohs or freeholders, barons or farmers, landowners have been the most capable, most intrepid, and most assertive members of civilized society."