https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/29/vernor-vinge-obituary
"One day in 1979, while logged in to San Diego State University’s principal
computer from his home, Vernor Vinge found himself chatting to another user via
the TALK program, both using implausible names and trying to figure out each
other’s true name. “Afterwards, I realised that I had just lived a
science-fiction story – at least by the standards of my childhood,” recalled
Vinge, a mathematics and computer science teacher at the university, who has
died from Parkinson’s disease aged 79.
The encounter was the starting point for his novella
True Names (1981), one
of the first sci-fi stories to predict an internet that is remarkably familiar
to us 40 years later, with its fully immersive multiplayer role-playing games,
dark web, hackers and trolls. Its descriptions of a virtual reality battle
between Mr Slippery and the Mailman predated William Gibson’s
Neuromancer by
three years and, while it was Gibson who named “cyberspace”, Vinge was the
godparent of its iconography.
At a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
in 1982, Vinge coined the term “the Singularity” to describe the increasingly
rapid acceleration of AI; he expanded on the concept in an editorial in the
science and sci-fi magazine
Omni, in which he said: “We will soon create
intelligences greater than our own. When this happens … the world will pass
beyond our understanding.”
A decade later, in
The Coming Technological Singularity (1993), Vinge
predicted that within 30 years “we will have the technological means to create
superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
