“instead of raising things from the dead, you raise them from nothing. And then you teach the nothing to know.” - this is more like what AI does
“Pythia was malfunctioning. […] She kept predicting apocalypses. Like, every day she’d predict the world was going to end by teatime or whatever”
“The thing people always forget about a few bad apples is the part where they spoil the bunch”
techgnosis - “the idea of Pythia having any sort of illness was the only thing that really scared them – the closest thing to a god-fearing, mortal-soul kind of scare, which they otherwise weren’t capable of at an institutional scale”
“’Its that omnipotence thing, isn’t it? Bunch of creator-gods walking around, making and unmaking empires”
“Vindictive wrath was in short supply, but Pythia was worth a lot of money when she was working properly – hence the fear, because she could save the world. Or end it. So yeah, the empire thing still applies.”
“I’ve already made it plenty clear that Delphi didn’t understand very much in general. This is what comes of defunding the arts, by the way. You get a lot of smart engineers who can’t understand when a magical supercomputer starts quoting Hamlet from a place of sarcasm.”
“Do you know what it was that made her want me? […] I wrote an article called, um, something like ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It and Your Anxiety is Just a Sign of the Times’”, doom, diagnosis of a computer program with anxiety, a little bit OCD issues with models of mental health, and does capitalism create mental illness, a realistic and reasonable response to your environment, patterns rather than erratic fear
“I asked her why she thought the world was ending and she produced […] a one-thousand-page report on climate change. […] just the wildfires in Southern California […] she produced a picture of my apartment building so I realized she was trying to relate to me”
“I began to suspect she’d been spending time on Reddit.”
“She told me that she remembered her birth and that it was painful. She said she didn’t trust the administrators of the New Academy and felt tired all the time, exhausted.”
“There was also only one thing she didn’t know about, which was life at Delphi. She didn’t know the names or backgrounds of her handlers, like that data had been pointedly erased”
“In the end, Emperor Theodosius I silenced the oracle the way all empires swallow things up – by destroying the temple and taking the knowledge away. It seems so simple when you put it that way, doesn’t it? Like that could be all it takes to kill a god.”
“along with whatever was required for causes that paid the bills, like war”
“The Olympias were feeding their creation with their own minds, their own decisions, the patterns of their own thoughts, and therefore they were resurrecting themselves over and over”