Vernor Vinge
Vernor Vinge
Vernor Steffen Vingeis a retired San Diego State UniversityProfessor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels and novellas A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, Rainbows End, Fast Times at Fairmont High, and The Cookie Monster, as well as for his 1984 novel The Peace War and his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argues that the creation of superhuman artificial intelligence will mark the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth10 February 1944
CountryUnited States of America
I say, let's learn more and then speculate.
Hexapodia as the key insight...I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs?
It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing.
Peregrine Wickwrackscar was flying. A pilgrim with legends that went back almost a thousand years-and not one of them could come near to this!
If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
I have come to kill you."The death's heads shrugged. "You have come to try.
All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge....And now revenge was all that life had left for him.
Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.
The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.
Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.
We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.