Quotes from Annalee Newitz

She wasn't sure which motivation made better fuel for innovation: naïve but ethical beliefs, or the need to survive.

He was a user of his own consciousness, but he did not have owner privileges. As a result, Paladin felt many things without knowing why.

Suffrage didn't mean equal opportunity.

That's when I decided the point of travel was not to observe history, but to change it.

People assigned genders based on behaviors and work roles, often ignoring anatomy. Gender was a form of social recognition.

As long as we tell our urban ancestors' stories, no city is ever lost. They live on, in our imaginations and on our public lands, as a promise that no matter how terrible things get, humans always try again.

Nothing like drugs to take the edge off drug problems.

Remember me but forget my fate.

The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.

Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?

I want to leave a better timeline behind, not just an open timeline but one where people who are not men can control the means of reproduction.

She could taste a nuanced ethical understanding of the patent system all over his body.

Back then, she was certain she could change the world just by making commits to a text file repository,

The khñum debt slavery scenario sounds brutal until you consider that most capitalist cultures in the West use a similar system. In the United States, it's not unusual for people to graduate from college with so much debt that they have to work their whole lives to pay it off.

Bots, who cost money, required a period of indenture to make their manufacture worthwhile. No such incentive was required for humans to make other humans.

My mother says that smart women are always crazy.

There was no giant sign proclaiming the end of life as they'd known it; instead, there was a mounting pile of annoyances and disappointments.

How many times had Paladin looked into this human face, its features animated by neurological impulse alone? He did not know. Even if he were to sort through his video memories and count them up one by one, he still didn't think he would have the right answer. But after today's mission, human faces would always look different to him. They would remind him of what it felt like to suffer, and to be relieved of suffering.

When it came to intellectual property, justice was simple and clear.

Every master loves to fuck a slave. It is a law of nature, or maybe culture.

and finally his current self-awareness, tinged with compulsions whose origins he couldn't access or control.

Perhaps human intelligence gathering was a version of network penetration, and he could better integrate into social situations by inviting humans to see an illusory version of himself.

She was designed to look human, her face the replica of a woman whose image Med's tissue engineer had licensed from an old Facebook database.

She just wouldn't stop reimplementing operating system features for her programming class. The only thing keeping her alive was a feeding tube the docs had managed to force up her nose while she was in restraints.