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)