"Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold—one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity—a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ..."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Fantasy authorsNovelists from EnglandPeople from LeedsScience fiction authors from EnglandGame designers
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), pp. 38-39
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Stross
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Charles Stross
295 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Charles Stross →
Related Quotes
"It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagr…"
"The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investme…"
"Let me give you a handle on that. Say the distance between the Earth and the sun is, oh, one centimeter. Mercury orbi…"
"No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent."
"Mo used to be a troubleshooter: whenever the organization had a spot of trouble she shot it until it stopped twitching."
"Story of my life. I wasted nearly a decade before I realized that life is not a game and there are no save points or …"
"A current generation smartphone is more powerful than a 1991 supercomputer."
"The number one crime in any age: offending the money."
"See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resource of an entire int…"
"Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live witho…"