28 Quotes by Karl Schroeder

The one thing we know about the future is that it will not be like today. I don't think that people should be too anxious about not knowing what they are going to do in the future, because we really can't know.

Foresight is not about predicting the future, it's about minimizing surprise.

Peter Watts has taken the core myths of the First Contact story and shaken them to pieces. The result is a shocking and mesmerizing performance, a tour-de-force of provocative and often alarming ideas. It is a rare novel that has the potential to set science fiction on an entirely new course. Blindsight is such a book.

Introducing a technology is not a neutral act--it is profoundly revolutionary. If you present a new technology to the world you are effectively legislating a change in the way we all live. You are changing society, not some vague democratic process. The individuals who are driven to use that technology by the disparities of wealth and power it creates do not have a real choice in the matter. So the idea that we are giving people more freedom by developing technologies and then simply making them available is a dangerous illusion.

Foresight is not about predicting the future, it’s about minimizing surprise.

The secret to life, she had said, was to find the little things, the unimportant ones that would nonetheless always remind you of the precious things they accompanied – and hold onto them.

The point is, if you treat reality like a game, it’s going to show in your decisions.

Frankenstein’s monster speaks: the computer. But where are its words coming from? Is the wisdom on those cold lips our own, merely repeated at our request? Or is something else speaking? – A voice we have always dreamed of hearing?

Give people the power of the gods, and they’ll eventually run down like wind-up toys for lack of reasons to go on.