Vernor Vinge – What if the Singularity Does NOT happen?
February 16th, 02007 by Stewart Brand
Non-Singularity scenarios
Vinge began by declaring that he still believes that a Singularity event in the next few decades is the most likely outcome— meaning that self-accelerating technologies will speed up to the point of so profound a transformation that the other side of it is unknowable. And this transformation will be driven by Artifical Intelligences (AIs) that, once they become self-educating and self-empowering, soar beyond human capacity with shocking suddeness….
Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary
This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Futures, Seminars, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted on March 1st, 2007 at 8:11 pm
This is appetite whetting, Stewart – thanks. One minor point: planes won’t run into each other as a result of large automation projects failing catastrophically, because TCAS (terminal collision avoidance systems) are becoming ubiquitous as well as simpler and more reliable. If we could clear the bureaucracy, we shouldn’t need any sort of large computers to maintain separation – we’ll do it much as we avoid running into other pedestrians in the street – see and avoid, that is, only better. Even the TCAS on my little plane allows me to see all traffic within a 12 mile radius. The fancier systems not only see, but plot the trajectories of all planes within a 25 mile radius and suggest routes around any potentially conflicting traffic. There’s actually little need for centralized air traffic control anymore, and certainly won’t within 10 years or so.
Posted on October 2nd, 2007 at 11:02 am
[...] the near present (or even past in Stephenson’s case). But since meeting Vernor Vinge at one of our lectures, I have been reading his amazing work and noticing the same trend. I started with his most recent [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2008 at 12:08 am
We are running out of TAP, Technologically Augmented Perception.
E=MC2 makes no claim about matter.
We must try and grasp mathematical equations as events rather then relationships.
As Events, irrational numbers are useless.
Posted on July 10th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Almost a year later, Long Now Seminar speaker Nassim Taleb pointed out that the future has always been profoundly unknowable, i.e. that social and economic systems are in a continuous state of near singularity. It’s only the fallacious familiarity of hindsight that leads to the belief that future singularities will be oxymoronically more unique than past singularities. Science fiction writer William Gibson has observed that the arrival of the future does not change much of the state of the lived environment, a fact that Zen Buddhist masters have been teaching for centuries.
Posted on November 9th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
The term social singularity refers to an event that could not be defined/forecast with available knowledgwe with society. society is full of anticipiated daily routines for human beings today. it is not same with early men. they lived with enormous no of survival singularities. today united states has to live with a economic melt down. this is a economic singularity. imposition of communism on afghan society in 1980 is a cultural singularity. in social space there are continious events, empty spaces and singularities. if this basic assumption is accepted, basic research in social sciences could be done with available mathematical and scientific models
Posted on December 5th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
[...] 5, 2008 by singularityguide Head over to the long now foundation for a very interesting summary of Vernor Vinge’s views on 3 non singularity [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2008 at 10:15 am
[...] you’d like to sample some of Vinge’s ideas, I recommend that you listen to the speech he gave last year as part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. The speech centers on [...]
Posted on July 14th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
True words, really some true words bro. You made my day.