“ I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all… Mark O'Connell
“ The culture of the Epic Fail, in its rituals of comic sacrifice, is a culture of sublimated predation. Mark O'Connell
“ Irony is a treacherous servant; unless it's very carefully watched over, it has a tendency to expose the foolishness of its apparent master. Mark O'Connell
“ I recalled with some discomfort that the man driving the vehicle had invented the sport of volcano boarding, presumably as a way of solving, in one deft move, the problems of the insufficient riskines… Mark O'Connell
“ The smell of hot popcorn drifted upward from the concourse below, lingering in the warm Californian air like an atmospheric irony, and a Jumbotron directly in front of me displayed a blandly handsome… Mark O'Connell
“ Humans, after all, weren’t actively hostile toward most of the species we’d made extinct over the millennia of our ascendance; they simply weren’t part of our design. The same could turn out to be tru… Mark O'Connell
“ It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its… Mark O'Connell
“ In this messianic vision, machine intelligence will come to redeem the universe of its incalculable stupidity. He takes a goal-oriented approach to cosmology, imposing upon the universe itself a kind… Mark O'Connell
“ Its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent Mark O'Connell
“ This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things. Mark O'Connell
“ This is one of the problems with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction. Mark O'Connell
“ When, some months later, Zoltan emailed me about his decision to run for president, I immediately called him. The first thing I asked was what his wife thought of the plan.“Well, in a way,” he said, “… Mark O'Connell
“ These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don’t imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of… Mark O'Connell
“ The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories. Mark O'Connell
