Sometime last night, after I had finished everything here, something came into my mind and I said to myself, “Oh, right, I did that, too, but didn’t include it in the blog.”
Looking up at the notes on my monitor, I don’t see what “that” was, and now I’m trying to remember.
I remembered. It’s not that big a deal.
Eric Ashley elsewhere speaks much of Verner Vinge and what is called “the singularity”; in fact, his Gaming Outpost blog (which I have cited on at least one occasion) is (was?) entitled Singularity’s End. I was aware that this was connected to the word of someone named Verner Vinge, whose name was unfamiliar to me.
It is one of the problems of aging that one gets isolated from the active intellectual community unless one either works within it or makes an effort to stay connected. Thus I find myself very familiar with materials known through the early seventies when I was in school, and with major trends which were covered in Omni during its brief life in the early eighties, but that much of what has followed, if it is outside the areas of my primary foci, is outside my familiarity. My knowledge is very spotty on current information in many areas. It is to some degree the price of being a generalist–that I am learning less and less about more and more, and one day will know nothing about everything. It is to some degree the price of Toffler’s Future Shock (see? Familiarity with older work), that information is expanding faster than anyone, even someone devoted to it, can pace. Thus Vinge’s work is apparently significant throughout the science and science fiction worlds, but unknown to me.
During my hiatus at the end of this week, that particular failing in my background has been mended. A few weeks ago, Grey Vanaman (usually mentioned here in connection with musical equipment, but who also brings his biblical, theological, spiritual, and philosophical questions to me) stumbled upon Vinge’s seminal article, and forwarded it to me, which I printed and placed with my current reading. During the down time I took a break from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis (a good but slow book from a slower time, laced with many quirks of its age and situation but still having much value) to read this article. It turns out that the singularity is something with which I’d had some familiarity prior to Vinge’s work, but not by that name; it concerns the development of what I was taught to call UIMs (Ultra Intelligent Machines), artificial intelligence smarter than human intelligence, along with related technologies which might (high probability might) bring us to a time when ordinary (that is, natural, even if exceptional) humans are no longer the smartest minds in our world. One reasonable conclusion from this is that humans will no longer be the designers, inventors, developers, or creators of our world. Vinge (citing previous authors) recognizes this as what might be termed an evolutionary turning point for the world, a moment of change so drastic that it is almost beyond our ability to imagine that which follows it.
None of the concepts were new to me, but they were well organized, clearly expressed, and persuasively defended. It was mostly the association of these diverse concepts under the one name that had escaped my attention.
So now I know; and so do you.
–M. J. Young
