Superhuman Imagination

Vernor Vinge on science fiction, the Singularity, and the state

Mike Godwin from the May 2007 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

When I was a 10-year-old reading science fiction, there had already been essays by people like [scientist and sociologist] J. D. Bernal and [engineer and computing pioneer] Vannevar Bush. And through the late 1940s and 1950s there was [statistics and probability theorist] I. J. Good. His 1965 paper (which I didn’t find until probably the 1990s) “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” includes almost exactly the notion of the Technological Singularity, though without using that terminology.

Reason: What is the role of science fiction in helping us cope with a transformation you believe many of us will live to see?

Vinge: I think science fiction can have all the power of conventional literature, but with the added potential for providing us with vivid, emotionally grounded insights into the future and into alternative scenarios. Speaking grandiosely, science fiction might be taken as having the role for humanity that sleep dreaming has for the individual. Sleep dreams are mostly nonsense, but sometimes we wake up with the stark realization that we have underestimated a possibility or a goodness or a threat.

Reason: Who are the most inspiring writers you’ve been reading lately?

Vinge: In connection with these topics, David Brin, Greg Egan, Karl Schroeder, Bruce Sterling, Charles Stross —and I fear I am missing others. In nonfiction, Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec. Hans is awesome, a more radical explorer than just about any science fiction writer.

Reason: You dedicate Rainbows End “to the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives—Wikipedia, Google, eBay, and the others of their kind, now and in the future.” What’s the story behind this dedication?

Vinge: I regard the current Internet as a test bed for the cognitive coordination of people and databases and computers. Tools such as Google, eBay, and Wikipedia are—I hope—harbingers of much more spectacular developments.

Reason: I notice that people of every age group are now reflexively using search engines—not just to answer questions but to find people, form groups of like-minded folks, and so on. It now feels like such a reflex that, on the rare occasions when I’m not connected to the Internet, I feel sort of hobbled or cut off.

Vinge: Me too!

Reason: In Marooned in Realtime and in Rainbows End you have couples that get together, break up, and then live long enough and change enough that they find each other again. On one hand, that doesn’t seem itself too terribly science fictional, but on the other hand we used not to live long enough, most of us, for such change and rapprochement to happen. It seems to me that learning how to live a long time is going to be a major task for us as individuals and as a society.

Vinge: Yes, and I hope it will be mainly a happy task!

Reason: It seemed like an interesting metaphor about how other long-term relationships in our lives can change or go sour.

Vinge: It would be interesting to see, if people could live in energetic good health for an additional few decades, how many would go back and undo mistakes that in past eras might only be the subject of pointless regret.

Reason: There doesn’t seem to be much of a guarantee in your works, or in Kurzweil’s, that the Singularity is going to be very pleasant or happy-making.

Vinge: Speaking for myself, that’s true. No guarantees. But if the Singularity were in prospect for 1,000 years from now, I think that many, including the likes of Ben Franklin, would regard it as the meliorist outcome of all the human striving down the centuries. It’s the possibility that it could happen in the next 20 years that’s scary!

Contributing Editor Mike Godwin is a research fellow at Yale University and a research scientist for the PORTIA Project.

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