More Human than Human Quotes

“We are a nation built on the promise that there are no roots. Every generation must be free to begin afresh somewhere else, leaving the old behind like fallen leaves.”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. —Ada Lovelace Scientific Memoirs, Selections from The Transactions of Foreign Academies and Learned Societies and from Foreign Journals”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“Instead, she says: “Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought that was cruel—the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It is a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves. No one ever gave you that test. We sought a new thing. It seemed, given everything, ridiculous. When we could both of us be dream-bodied dragons and turning over and over in an orbital bubble suckling code-dense syrup from each others’ gills, a Turing test seemed beyond the point.”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“My grandfather’s treasured ax,” the sheriff said. “It was handed down to my father, who then gave it to me. And in its life, it has had two new heads and three new handles. But it is still my grandfather’s ax.”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“Pestilence, poverty, starvation, wars, and daytime TV programming have all plagued human existence for too long. These problems are not insolvable, however. All that’s required is brain power. Evolved human brain power has not been enough. We need more power. With the rapid development of processing ability, computers are positioned to overtake human abilities and move beyond to a position where they can solve our problems. Thus, we anticipate Singularity to occur at 18:15:32 on Sunday, two weeks from this coming.”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity

“Ballet was created by trading pain for beauty, she used to say. Eventually, beauty vanished and left only the pain.”
― Neil Clarke, More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity