Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. —Anonymous

Are you smarter than me?"
"I'll answer that when you give me a working definition of intelligence.

“The timing might not be significant,” I said. “Just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean they’re related.”
Abigail gave me a withering look. But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.

From a policing point of view, 3-D printers were your classic new technology. Everybody knew they were going to be used by criminals for something, but nobody was sure what.

There were a couple of mentions of drones, but the assumption was that they were operated by the police, the gangs, space lizards or all three at once. The media were continuing their comforting lack of interest in things that didn’t fit their various agendas.

And what they don’t want you to know, you definitely want to know.

Not your type?"
"I'm strictly a case by case kind of guy. But if I had a type it wouldn't be him.

“That’s assuming that the Singularity hasn’t already happened,” said Victor. “And we’re not sentient virtual personalities inhabiting a simulation of reality.”
“How would we know?” I said.

“An AGI?” I asked, because at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation it was important to make a distinction between Artificial General Intelligence and ordinary AI. AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Turing test and ask difficult philosophical questions before going “Daisy-Daisy” and trying to wipe out humanity, while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon.

I asked Reynolds if she could put the bodyguards on what we’d taken to calling the Unreality List of people that might be magical, members of the demi-monde or suspiciously weird.
“It would save ever so much time,” Reynolds had said when we set it up, “if we just added the population of Florida right at the start.”

Old Street roundabout is a diamond-shaped circulatory system designed in the late 1960s to thin out the number of cyclists heading in and out of the City. In line with the then-current planning conventions they added a series of mugger-friendly underpasses, an insufficiently wide entrance to Old Street Underground station, and a small shopping arcade lined with urine-attracting beige tile.…
You can say what you like about late-sixties architecture, but when they baked in the ugly they baked it in good.

It’s one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instinct of a moth in a candle factory. They run the wrong way, they refuse to move, some will run toward the danger, and others will instantly whip out their phones and take footage.

“There’s paperwork for magic? asked Vanessa.
“Not so glamorous now, eh?” I said.

The more power something has, the less the actual facts matter.

Not everything that’s unexplained is caused by magic.