Sci-fi author Vernor Vinge, creator of the tech singularity concept, has died at age 79.
Sci-fi author Vernor Vinge, creator of the tech singularity concept, has died at age 79.
Vinge won multiple Hugo awards and created a sci-fi concept that drives AI researchers.
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It amazes me that as famous as the concept of the tech singularity has become, how little its implications enter most people's thoughts. When most people talk about the future, they do it without any regard for its implications. Even more amazingly, when it comes to academics and intellectuals paid to think about the future, almost none of them ever do. I've yet to see an Economist who seems to know about the concept. When Economists make predictions about the effect of technology on our economic future, they are far more likely to reference trends from the early 20th, or even 19th century.
I suspect all the problems and opportunities the tech singularity will create won't be dealt with in advance in a planned orderly fashion. Rather it will be like March 2020 with Covid, and suddenly we'll be scrambling for emergency responses to a brand new reality.
I'm a former singularitarian, and sadly, we live in a universe that will not be seeing a technological singularity.
Moore's Law has been dead for over a decade, tech isn't advancing like it did when we were kids, and we've reached the hard physical limits of electronic transistor technology. Even if we manage to get one of the proposed alternatives to work (photonics, spintronics, plasmonics, etc), the most we'll see is one or two more price-performance doublings before those hit a wall too.
The technological curve isn't exponential, it's sigmoid. Those economists know what they're talking about because they've internalized Alvin Toffler's "Limits to Growth" as a prerequisite for futures studies.
Holy shit, finally someone else who gets what i’m saying!
I completely agree. Moore’s law is dead, photonic computing and graphene transistors (which i’ve heard are set to replace it) probably won’t be here for a while, i agree that tech has slowed down, and overall, things are not looking good.
I am very scared of the possibility of a long period of slow, incremental growth. But unfortunately, i think deep down i know it’s a very real possibility. The world of 2030 may look pretty much the same as today, with 2040 not looking much different than that.
I’m a former singularitarian,
I’m glad to see that a former singularitarian has seen the truth. While i wasn’t too deep into the Kurzweil Koolaid, i did at one point think that we were getting AGI in a matter of a couple decades. With the slowdown of computing progress, that clearly isn’t happening.
I can't find a book called Limits to Growth by Alvin Toffler. Were you thinking of the Donella Meadows et al book of that title, or some other book by Toffler? Or has my google-fu just failed me? If the latter I'd love a link or something so I can check it out.
No, that's my bad. For some reason I was also thinking of Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" and got the authors mixed up. XD
Limits to Growth predicts collapse though, so I rather hope it's not accurate