“Thalience is an attempt to give nature a voice without that voice being ours in disguise. It is the only way for an artificial intelligence to be grounded in a self-identity that is truly independent of its creator's.” The Hamburg Manifesto in Ventus by Karl Schroeder
“What if you could separate the activity of science from the human researchers who conduct it? Automate it, in fact? Imagine creating a bot that does physics experiments and builds an internal model of the world based on those experiments. It could start out as something simple that stacked blocks and knocked them over again. Later models could get quite sophisticated; and let's say we combine this ability with the technology of self-reproducing machines (von Neumann machines). Seed the moon with our pocket-protector-brandishing AIs and let them go nuts. Let them share their findings and refine their models.”
“We don't want machine copies of our own minds, we want to give the natural world itself a voice” –Karl Schroeder