Use of Weapons (A Culture Novel Book 3)

“They also,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, “refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value — carbon fascists.”

My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” — the man laughed — “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?

‘Za-kalwe, in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.’

“Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,” he said. “And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.”

“Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell. “Why, of course!” she laughed. “Then why do you do it?” “It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think, I hel