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
He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.
Poor humans; they will all die.""Poor us; we will not.
But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.
Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.
Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.
I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.
The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle 60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
So much technology, so little talent.
Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding.
We're endangered by our own success.