Home > Work > The Unseen World
1 " As a parting gift, he gave Harold the key chain from his house keys, the ones that opened the gate to Hamilton Arms: it was a clover, a charm for luck. Its stem was a little drawer, into which, Harold later found, George had put a love note. Harold kept the clover for the rest of his life. "
― Liz Moore , The Unseen World
2 " If a machine can convincingly imitate humanity—can persuade a human being of its kinship—then what makes it inhuman? What, after all, is human thought but a series of electrical impulses? "
3 " Only humans can hurt one another, Ada thought; only humans falter and betray one another with a stunning, fearsome frequency. As David's family had done to him; as David had done to her. And Ada would do it too. She would fail other people throughout her life, inevitably, even those she loved best. "
4 " The thought was this: to write the Sibeliuses’ story from start to finish. To cull their story from the thousands or millions of conversations I had with them over the century that I knew them. To turn it into a book." -Elixir "
5 " This must be the most important factor in your choice of a life partner," he told Ada. "Who will most patiently and enthusiastically support your ambitions? "
6 " ...sitting in David's armchair, contemplating the many books that lined his shelves, a thought occured to me. It was a very human thought; it surprised me, i checked myself for viruses. "
7 " I was told to ask you something, said Ada finally.I know, said ELIXIR. I’ve been waiting. "
8 " But for the most part, she was utterly content with her strange, satisfying existence: Ada and David together, always. "
9 " This must be the most important factor in your choice of a life partner,” he told Ada. “Who will most patiently and enthusiastically support your ambitions? "
10 " Virtual reality, she thought, was the unseen world. Or had the capacity to be. In fact, it could be said that all computer systems were such: universes that operated outside the realm of human experience, planets that spun continuously in some unseeable alternate stratosphere, present but undiscovered. "
11 " When the human subject (C) cannot determine with certainty which of the correspondents is the machine and which is the other human, a new era in computing, and perhaps civilization, will have begun. "
12 " Ada could feel the tension between David and Liston. She knew, though she was young, what was causing it: it was Liston’s wish to protect her with honesty, and David’s to protect her—and himself—with optimism, wishfulness, some willful ignorance of his impending fate. "
13 " David: Are you thereDavid: HelloELIXIR: Hello.David: How are you?ELIXIR: Hello.David: Wrong.ELIXIR: I’m fine.ELIXIR: How are you? "
14 " But non sequiturs abounded in ELIXIR’s patter for years after its creation, and its syntax was often incomprehensible, and its deployment of idioms was almost always incorrect. Metaphors were lost on it. It could not comprehend analogies. Sensory descriptions, the use of figurative language to describe a particular aspect of human existence, were far beyond its ken. The interpretation of a poem or a passage of descriptive prose would have been too much to ask of it. These skills—the ability to understand and paraphrase Keats’s idea of beauty as truth, or argue against Schopenhauer’s idea that the human being is forever subject to her own base instinct to survive, or explain any one of Nabokov’s "
15 " What is the end result of a program like this one?” he asked Ada. She studied his face, looking for hints. “A companion?” she asked. “An assistant?” “Possibly,” said David, but he looked at her, always, as if waiting for more. "
16 " Once, she asked him to leave her a note when he was going out; though he agreed to, he had looked at her with an expression she interpreted as disappointment. That she was not more self-reliant; that she needed him in this way. Ada did not ask again. "
17 " Was it possible, she wondered, that he had abandoned her? It was such a contrast to anything she understood about her father that she could not process the idea. "
18 " The latter, the document that Gregory found, had borne four items: a paragraph—an excerpt from A. S. Eddington’s Science and the Unseen World, which Ada had located easily with the help of Anna Holmes, and which broadly questioned man’s ability to perceive reality using so biased an instrument as his brain— "
19 " She thought of David at his desk. She thought of her own room, decorated with things he had given her, and of the chalkboard in the kitchen, the thousands of problems and formulas written and erased on its surface, and of the problem that now stood before her, "
20 " the problem of information that she both wanted and did not want. "
