Mark O'connell said this quote

“ 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 announcer seated behind a curved desk emblazoned with DARPA’s logo: a sports broadcast mise-en-scène from some speculative future, vaguely fascist, in which the machinery of national defense had become a spectacle of mass entertainment. ”

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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

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 a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.

~ 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, “it was Lisa who gave me the idea. Remember how I said she wanted me to do something concrete, get some kind of a proper job?”“I do,” I said. “Although I’m guessing running for president on the immortality platform was not what she had in mind.”“That’s correct,” he confirmed. “It took a little while for her to come around to the idea.”“How did you break it to her?”“I left a note on the refrigerator,” he said, “and went out for a couple hours.

~ Mark O'connell

This is one of the problems with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction.

~ Mark O'connell