More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
vision and storytelling can be used to go beyond simply imagining the future into actually creating it.
Apparently, people thought nothing of hanging their personal fortunes on technology they didn’t understand.
Gragg glanced around at people getting into their leased cars to drive back to bank-owned homes. They were cattle. He viewed these oblivious drones with contempt.
They both shared a keen interest in technology and information—the tools of personal power.
"Its proximate purpose appears to be self-preservation. Its ultimate purpose is unclear. It acts like a distributed AI agent—which
His chief complaint was that they gave a false sense of precision to poor thinking. But then, technology was like religion—you either had the faith or you didn’t.
Your Constitution and your Bill of Rights were an incredible gift to mankind. Although lately America appears to have strayed from the path set forth by its founders."
It was a dancing display of computer-controlled water jets, recirculating hundreds of gallons per second. Mosely walked around it, just now noticing how many things must be controlled by computers. It wasn’t intelligence, but then again most things in life didn’t really require intelligence.
Worried about systems.
Leland’s equity offerings used tedious statistical analysis to mask the fact that their business centered on enslaving foreign people and ravaging their lands.
"Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system . . .."
"But if they’re so successful, why haven’t parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven’t noticed. That’s because successful parasites don’t kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce . . .."
"Look, let’s not turn this into a blamestorming session.
"Russ, our competitors deliver market information in seconds to their clients, and we need to also. That doesn’t even begin to cover the fact that we need information just as much, if not more, than our clients in order to make a profit. If you turn off these systems, you may as well lock the doors."
the Great Diffusion has begun—an era when the nation state dissolves. Technology will cause this. As countries compete for markets in the global economy, diffusion of high technology will accelerate. It will result in a diffusion of power. And diffusion of power will make countries an ineffective organizing principle. At first, marginal governments will fail. Larger states will not be equipped to intercede effectively. These lawless regions will become breeding grounds for international crime and terrorism. Threats to centralized authority will multiply. Centralized power will be defenseless
...more
"Distributed daemons are a foregone conclusion in the coming world.
This was the very essence of capitalism: thriving on chaos.
"They’re armored, Doctor. Light weapons don’t stop them.
rhyme and meter—the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum—a mnemonic device. You couldn’t fuck with the code or the rhymes didn’t work; and if the rhymes didn’t work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact.
I’ll tell you what the Daemon is: the Daemon is a remorseless system for building a distributed civilization. A civilization that perpetually regenerates. One with no central authority.
"I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy.
