The Perfect Wife Quotes

“We already have eight hundred million people living in hunger—and population is growing by eighty million a year. Over a billion people are in poverty—and present industrial strategies are making them poorer, not richer. The percentage of old people will double by 2050—and already there aren’t enough young people to care for them. Cancer rates are projected to increase by seventy percent in the next fifteen years. Within two decades our oceans will contain more microplastics than fish. Fossil fuels will run out before the end of the century. Do you have an answer to those problems? Because I do. Robot farmers will increase food production twentyfold. Robot carers will give our seniors a dignified old age. Robot divers will clear up the mess humans have made of our seas. And so on, and so on—but every single step has to be costed and paid for by the profits of the last.” He paused for breath, then went on, “My vision is a society where autonomous, intelligent bots are as commonplace as computers are now. Think about that—how different our world could be. A world where disease, hunger, manufacturing, design, are all taken care of by AI. That’s the revolution we’re shooting for. The shopbots get us to the next level, that’s all. And you know what? This is not some binary choice between idealism or realism, because for some of us idealism is just long-range realism. This shit has to happen. And you need to ask yourself, do you want to be part of that change? Or do you want to stand on the sidelines and bitch about the details?” We had all heard this speech, or some version of it, either in our job interviews, or at company events, or in passionate late-night tirades. And on every single one of us it had had a deep and transformative effect. Most of us had come to Silicon Valley back in those heady days when it seemed a new generation finally had the tools and the intelligence to change the world. The hippies had tried and failed; the yuppies and bankers had had their turn. Now it was down to us techies. We were fired up, we were zealous, we felt the nobility of our calling…only to discover that the general public, and our backers along with them, were more interested in 140 characters, fitness trackers, and Grumpy Cat videos. The greatest, most powerful deep-learning computers in humanity’s existence were inside Google and Facebook—and all humanity had to show for it were adwords, sponsored links, and teenagers hooked on sending one another pictures of their genitals.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife

“Living forever will become as simple as making an upload.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife

“What is love but another name for positive reinforcement? —B. F. SKINNER, Walden Two”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife

“Perhaps the real test of someone’s humanity, you think, is how tenderly they treat those like Danny. Whether they blindly try to fix them and make them more like everyone else, or whether they can accept their differentness and adapt the world to it.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife

“We had to find ways of bringing the costs down. And that, frankly, was a task Tim wasn’t very good at. He was a visionary, not a bean counter. So the problem never really got solved, and the funding slowly drifted away. We were stagnating.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife

“As you lie down on your own bed, a quotation comes to you. There is surely nothing finer than to educate a young thing for oneself: a lass of eighteen or twenty years old is as pliable as wax. Who said that? You wait, and sure enough, that comes to you too. Clunk. Adolf Hitler.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife

“The point of the prenup is never the prenup,’ she says flatly. ‘The point of the prenup is, first, to get two idealistic, loved-up individuals to be honest about what their expectations for this relationship are. And second, to provide some kind of road map for a healthy marriage.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife

“The shopbots get us to the next level, that’s all. And you know what? This is not some binary choice between idealism or realism, because for some of us idealism is just long-range realism.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife

“My vision is a society where autonomous, intelligent bots are as commonplace as computers are now. Think about that – how different our world could be. A world where disease, hunger, manufacturing, design – all are taken care of by AI. That’s the revolution we’re shooting for.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife

“Robot carers will give our seniors a dignified old age. Robot divers will clear up the mess humans have made of our seas. And so on, and so on – but every single step has to be costed and paid for by the profits of the last.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife