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
We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.
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 will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.
Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years.
It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.
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.
Well, maybe it won't happen at all: Sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms that we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop.
Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots.
How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.
The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.
The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.