Vernor Vinge Quotes

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

I just think we're living in a time of massive, amazing change, like the Industrial Revolution on acid.

I don't think that a Singularity would be visible to those going through one. Even the most disruptive changes are not universally or immediately distributed, and late followers learn from the reactions and dilemmas of those who had initially encountered the disruptive change.

So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.

As Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a 'singularity.'

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.

I'm not afraid of computers taking over the world.

I don't know whether I'm, like, jumping the gun but it's possible that in the future we may be able to use the information that we can't receive at the moment.

Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction. But the machines we're creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach.

I just think that we're living in a world where the technology is advancing so rapidly. You're having cameras that are capable of more and more - the resolution on cameras is jumping up.

Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence - in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement - wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.

Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.

We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.

Some of the 'aha' insights that scientists strive for may have to await the emergence of post-human intellects.

Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.

The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.

Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

Everything we have learned in the last 15,000 years will be swept away in the coming years…. The next hundred years will produce more changes than have taken place in the last 100,000 years. Indeed, the last 100 years have produced more change than the last 100,000 years.

Artificial Intelligence is one of those areas where we should be proactive in controlling it rather than reactive. If we are reactive, by the time we will do the necessary things, it will be too late. Robots can do everything better than we [humans] can.

By definition, the Singularity means that machines would be smarter than us, and, in their wisdom, they can innovate new technologies. The innovations would come so quickly, and increasingly quickly, that the innovation would make Moore's Law seem as antiquated as Hammurabi's Code.

I think the 'Terminator' idea is a reasonable one - that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you're making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It's not that you don't like the ants, it's not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.