“Where Kurzweil sees a steady march of progress interrupted by occasional hiccups, I see a few fragile and improbable victories against a backdrop of malice, stupidity, and greed: the tiny amount of good humans have accomplished in constant danger of drowning in a sea of blood and tears, as happened to so many of the civilizations of antiquity.

“It is, alas, a truism that authors generally have less experience than other men. This owing to the incontestable fact that you simply can’t be in two places at once. Either you’re in front of the typewriter, writing, or you’re out in the world having experiences. Therefore, since you need to write and you need to have experiences to write about, you have to learn to do more with less. And doing more with less is, in a word, what writing is all about.

“As software and hardware engineers, if our defaults put users in an unsafe situation, where their credit and savings are placed at risk, then we’ve failed them, and we’ve acted unethically.

“The problem in scaling software projects is not a communication problem; it’s a dependency problem. Control quality by being hierarchical and rigorous about how you test and accept changes, not how you generate them.

“I haven’t overheard a single intellectual conversation in three years, unless it was between Indian or Asian students.

“My biggest encouragement to those who are scared of criticism to enter the public space is this: if you don’t, the public space will be filled with people who have no fear of their failings whatsoever. And we all know what fools they are.

“We applied a red, yellow or black spot to a place on the necks of five magpies. The stickers could only be seen using a mirror. Then we gave the birds mirrors. The feel of the mark on their necks did not seem to alarm them. But when the birds with coloured neck spots caught a glimpse of themselves, they scratched at their necks—a clear indication that they recognised the image in the mirror as their own. Those who received a black sticker, invisible against the black neck feathers, did not react.

“It’s probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies.