Vernor Vinge Quotes
Vernor Steffen Vinge is a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels and novellas.
(1944 - )
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And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.
[Technology]
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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.
[Acts]
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Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
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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.
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But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
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Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
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How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
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I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.
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I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
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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.
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IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.
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In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.
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It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.
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Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.
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The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
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The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
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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.
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The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
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We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
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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.
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