Hubris, complicity, and choices that outrun their consequences.
Not for the first time the idea of spaceflight seemed monstrous to him: like a human sacrifice, to serve geopolitical ends.
Especially since the Chinese were adopting a strategy which some argued the Americans should have followed all along: to drop any attempt at perfect reliability, to accept lower-cost, more practical solutions—and the heroic deaths that would inevitably accompany them.
It was as if humans were studying the ecology by testing it to destruction, in a kind of huge, one-off, millennial experiment. Maybe when we've reduced the whole thing to the grass and the ants, she thought bleakly, we'll understand how it all used to work.
believe me, they can't breed."
"He's all right. He's an engineer. Wu's the same. They're both technicians. They don't have intelligence. They have what I call 'thintelligence.' They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it 'being focused.' They don't see the surround. They don't see the consequences.
"You know what's wrong with scientific power?" Malcolm said. "It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are. It never fails."
The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.
'Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation …'
(The connection between stupidity and cruelty is a close one.)
JUST BECAUSE SOME of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe. THE END
Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one's conscience to get in the way.
We ultimately predict AIs that will not hate us, but that will have weird, strange, alien preferences that they pursue to the point of human extinction.