Talk:The Singularity
Date?
I'm confused when/how Vernor Vinge coined the term. I have and article dated to 1993, but other info suggests 1986? Deku-shrub (talk) 05:36, 6 April 2019 (CDT)
- Good question! I've often wondered about that too.
- For what looks like good answers, see this section of Wikipedia, and the two notes (101, 102) mentioned there.
- This appears to be from an article Vinge wrote in 1983:
- We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between ... so that the world remains intelligible.
- And this is from an article in 1988:
- Barring a worldwide catastrophe, I believe that technology will achieve our wildest dreams, and soon. When we raise our own intelligence and that of our creations, we are no longer in a world of human-sized characters. At that point we have fallen into a technological "black hole," a technological singularity.
- (My emphasis added) David W. Wood (talk) 11:24, 6 April 2019 (CDT)