As always, it was necessary to strike a balance between a cavalier disregard for the rules and a professional understanding that some rules were more… - Alastair Reynolds

“Besides—we all know guns don’t kill people, do they?”
“No, it’s the small metal projectiles that generally do the killing,” Cahuella said, smiling.

We're pushing into deep space now—Trans-Neptunian, the inner boundary of the Kuiper belt, and we've even got machines in the Oort cloud. That's where it gets stickier. If we're going to do anything useful out there, we'll need smart machines and lots of them. Machines that break right through the existing cognition thresholds, into post-artilect computation. Human-level thinkers that can live with us, be our equals as well as our workers." "You're not sounding any less scary than you were five minutes ago," Geoffrey said. "Look, in a thousand years, the difference between people and machines…It's going to seem about as relevant as the difference between Protestants and Catholics: some ludicrous relic of Dark Age thinking.

We're flexible," Campion said. "It's the price we pay for being sentient.