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Interview: Vernor VingeInterview: Vernor VingePosted Dec 10, 2008 21:25 UTC (Wed) by leoc (subscriber, #39773)Parent article: Interview: Vernor Vinge
I personally feel the concept of a "singularity" is a bit too much like religion for my tastes, but this kind of kooky stuff is what makes SF interesting. Thanks for the interview.
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Likely singularities Posted Dec 10, 2008 21:39 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
History has seen many singularities, but none yet worldwide unless you count internet, air travel, telegraph, railroad, agriculture, etc. The most common experience of localized singularity is collapse and mass starvation. In the modern world that remains the most likely experience, possibly subsequent to climate change, seafood exhaustion, oil exhaustion, epidemic, widespread staple crop failure, world war, or what-have-you.
Likely singularities Posted Dec 10, 2008 22:55 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] History has seen many singularities, but none yet worldwide unless you count internet, air travel, telegraph, railroad, agriculture, etc. Interesting. Can you elaborate on that, please?
Likely singularities Posted Dec 11, 2008 2:51 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
It's a bit off-topic, but read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. Read it for its own sake. It includes examples of singularities successfully averted.
Most of my examples above are not so great; probably the global singularities in our past are actually limited to adoption of agriculture and, earlier, language, and the near-extinction event ca. 50K B.P. (maybe a climate-affecting eruption).
As noted elsewhere, a Vinge singularity is just an event after which the world becomes incomprehensible to someone raised before it occurred.
Likely singularities Posted Dec 11, 2008 14:08 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]
I'm sure that happened to me in about 1991...
Likely singularities Posted Dec 11, 2008 0:03 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Agriculture seems to be a pretty good example of a worldwide singularity.
The pre-agriculturalists could not have predicted anything much about the lifestyles of the agriculturalists. It wasn't nice, either for the fading hunter-gatherers or the agriculturalists: they got much higher population densities, but it took ten thousand years for human health and lifespans to regain their probable pre-agriculture norms.
Interview: Vernor Vinge Posted Dec 10, 2008 22:17 UTC (Wed) by brouhaha (guest, #1698) [Link] If it's "a bit too much like religion", that just means that you're reading too much into what the word singularity means in this context.It's very hard to predict the future with any degree of accuracy, and since the advance of technology is on an exponential curve (e.g. Moore's Law), it is clear that predicting the future is becoming more difficult. From that, it seems obvious (at least since Vinge pointed it out) that there is some point in the future beyond which it is impossible to make sensible predictions, and that point isn't very far away. What that doesn't tell us is the nature of the singularity itself or the post-singularity world. Naturally we can speculate about it, and anyone that tells you that the singularity will be the result of a specific trend or technology (e.g. nanotechnology) is by definition only speculating.
Interview: Vernor Vinge Posted Dec 11, 2008 9:58 UTC (Thu) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]
Science Fiction authors using the term 'singularity' makes me think of the huge numbers of economic experts I saw on CNN in early October talking about the world's economic state. Each and every one sidestepped a real answer with the words 'it's hard'. I don't doubt that imagining a future radically different to ours, in consistent detail (or understanding how our global financial system might behave) is hard. But to say 'it's singular and will be unlike anything we have seen' robs me of enjoying the fantasy of what it *might* be.
Interview: Vernor Vinge Posted Dec 11, 2008 15:44 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]
I believe the word singularity has a more rigourous definition. IANAP, but I believe singularity in physics refers to either time 0 where backwards extrapolation divides by zero, or the similar problem trying to calculate what happens inside a black hole. You literally lose the ability to predict what happens.
Thus it is with social singularities. The social change is so profound that you cannot predict what will happen. No one could have predicted the changes the printing press made in Europe, with growing literacy and democratization of governments. No one could have predicted the changes wrought by electronics / computers / the internet. No one can predict what will happen when computers achieve human equivalent intelligence, and shortly thereafter superhuman intelligence in accord with Moore's law.
Think of it as a phase change. People whose weather experience is limited to temperatures of 30-40C normally and 20C once in a blue moon would imagine 0 to just be more so, possibly uncomfortable. Snow and ice would be utterly foreign to them, unimaginable and unpredictable.
Interview: Vernor Vinge Posted Dec 11, 2008 23:35 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The definition of a singularity comes from maths, not physics: in simple
terms it's the point at which something goes abruptly to negative or positive infinity (or zero, sometimes). In maths it's not necessarily a sign that there's anything wrong: in physics, it tends to mean your model's broken down and can't model those conditions (on the arbitrary assumption that infinities don't exist in the real universe).
The singularities at the Big Bang and inside black holes are two examples
Interview: Vernor Vinge Posted Dec 11, 2008 0:01 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Don't confuse what Vinge calls the Singularity with what Kurzweil calls
the Singularity. Kurzweil's messianic stuff seems to have very much less rationality at the core of it than Vinge's. He seems to think we'll all become gods if we just wait long enough, while Vinge simply says that we cannot predict what will happen past that point. It may be good, it may be bad, it may be nothing we can define as either.
(For a possibility on the nastier end of the predictable scale, see
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