Vinge's Fork

 Came before Mongs and is probably just as dead as his - Vernor and Timothy - together forever )

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/vicos-singularity-republished?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1745679&post_id=166381826&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=pmgcb&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Vernor Vinge died some weeks ago. He wrote two very good science fiction novels, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky (the other books vary imo from ‘just fine’ to ‘yikes!’), but he will most likely be remembered for his arguments about the Singularity. I’ve written (Economist; unpaywalled version) about how both sides of the dominant Silicon Valley disputes about “AI” can be traced back to Vinge’s seminal essay. Do you think that uncontrollable AI will accidentally or deliberately squash human civilization as it reaches for the stars? Or instead believe that AI-augmented humanity will flourish and spread out through the cosmos? You have chosen the one tine, or the other, of Vinge’s Fork.

Over the last several months – since before Vinge died – I’ve been trying to puzzle out an argument. Here’s my best stab at it so far.

Vinge’s Fork is just one overdramatic rendering of a basic problem of modernity. The more fundamental intellectual dilemma begins to emerge at least a few centuries before.