Vernor Vinge, David Brin, and Others Debate The Singularity

 Singularity  

The Los Angeles Science Fiction Convention last year featured a panel of four influential science fiction authors, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, Phil Osborn and technology journalist Mitch Wagner discussing the Singularity.

A t the Los Angeles Science Fiction Convention last year, a panel of four influential science fiction authors, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, Phil Osborn and technology journalist Mitch Wagner. —The topic for the group was  The Singularity.

While Brin dominates the discussion in the video below, the panel does offer some interesting insights.

Brin's latest novel, "Existence," tells the story of Gerald Livingston an orbital garbage collector. For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and someone has to clean it up. But there’s something spinning a little bit higher than he expects, something that isn’t on the decades’ old orbital maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.”

Vinge is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels and novellas A Fire Upon The Deep , A Deepness in the Sky, Rainbows End, Fast Times at Fairmont High  and The Cookie Monster , The Children of the Sky, as well as for his 1984 novel The Peace War and his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity", in which he argued that the creation of superhuman artificial intelligence will mark the point at which "the human era will be ended."  For this essay, Brin calls Vinge Singularity's "Dad." 




SOURCE  Adam Ford

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