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
All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.
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?
The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.
I have come to kill you."The death's heads shrugged. "You have come to try.
If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever.
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.
How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.
IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.
The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
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 work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
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.