Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
They had no way of knowing yet whether the population of Quinta was made up of living creatures or, possibly, nonbiological automata: the heirs of an extinct civilization. One could not rule out the grim hypothesis that the arms race, having exterminated life (with perhaps a few remaining souls huddled in shelters or caves), was being carried on by
... See moreStanislaw Lem • Fiasco
The existence of free will meant that we couldn’t know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness. Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew
... See moreTed Chiang • Stories of Your Life and Others
Opinion | The Author Behind ‘Arrival’ Doesn’t Fear AI. ‘Look at How We Treat Animals.’ (Published 2021)
‘The Ezra Klein Show’nytimes.comThey want something that responds like a person, but isn’t owed the same obligations as a person, and that’s something she can’t give them.
Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.
Cixin Liu • Death's End (The Three-Body Problem Book 3)
The physicist Robert Forward wrote a superb science-fiction story, Dragon’s Egg, based on the premise that information could be stored and processed – and life and intelligence could evolve – through the interactions between neutrons on the surface of a neutron star (a star that has collapsed gravitationally to a diameter of only a few kilometres,
... See moreDavid Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
My real sympathy, though, is with the bright thirteen-year-old, curled on a sofa somewhere, twenty pages into the book and desperate to get to the root of the mystery of why cell phones aren’t allowed in Chiba City. Hang in there, friend. It can only get stranger.
William Gibson • Neuromancer (Sprawl Trilogy Book 1)
realizes that he needs to spend his life making strange things.