"The Singularity" is a phrase borrowed from the astrophysics of black holes. The phrase has varied meanings; as used by Vernor Vinge and Raymond Kurzweil, it refers to the idea that accelerating technology will lead to superhuman machine intelligence that will soon exceed human intelligence, probably by the year 2030. The results on the other side of the "event horizon," they say, are unpredictable. We'll try anyway.
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Dr. Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. He is author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and the Singularity.
He earned a bachelor's degree in 1970 from MIT.
Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. He has founded nine businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art.
Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, United States' largest award in invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology.
He has also received scores of other awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT in 1998, the Association of American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received eleven honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents.
In December 2004, Kurzweil joined the advisory board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Vernor Steffen Vinge (pronounced VIN-jee, rhyming with 'stingy') (born February 10, 1944) is a mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction author who is best known for his Hugo award-winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep, and for his 1993 essay "The Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.
Vinge published his first short story, "Bookworm, Run!", in 1965 in Analog Science Fiction, then edited by John W. Campbell. He was then a moderately prolific contributor to SF magazines in the 1960s and early 1970s, including adapting two of his stories into a short novel, Grimm's World (1969), and publishing a second novel, The Witling (1975).
Vinge came to prominence in 1981 with his novella True Names, which is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others (and particularly to the cyberpunk genre).
His next two novels, The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986), concern the impact of a technology which can create impenetrable force fields called "Bobbles" (with other properties which aren't revealed here as they are spoilers for the former book). These books built Vinge's reputation as an author who would explore his science fictional ideas to their logical conclusions and in novel and particularly inventive ways. He was nominated for the Hugo Award for both books, but in each case lost to novels by William Gibson and Orson Scott Card.
These two novels and "True Names" also emphasized Vinge's interest in the technological singularity. "True Names" takes place in a world on the cusp of the singularity. The Peace War shows a world in which the singularity has been postponed by the Bobbles, while Marooned in Realtime follows a small group of people who have managed to miss the singularity which otherwise encompassed Earth.
Vinge finally won the Hugo Award with his 1992 novel, A Fire Upon the Deep. In it, Vinge envisions a galaxy that is divided up into "zones of thought", in which the further one moves from the center of the galaxy, the higher the level of technology one can achieve. Earth is in "The Slow Zone", in which faster-than-light (FTL) travel cannot be achieved. Most of the book, however, takes place in a zone called "The Beyond", where the computations necessary for FTL travel are possible, but transcendence beyond the Singularity to superhuman intelligence is not. Thus Vinge could write a classic space opera despite his belief that the technology required for such stories would push us past the singularity. Fire includes a large number of additional ideas making for an unusually complex and rich universe and story.
A Deepness in the Sky (1999) was a prequel to Fire, following competing groups of humans in The Slow Zone as they struggle over who has the rights to exploit a technologically emerging alien culture. Deepness also won a Hugo Award in 2000.
Vinge has also won Hugos for his novellas, "Fast Times at Fairmont High" in 2002, and "The Cookie Monster" in 2004.
Vinge retired in 2002 from teaching at San Diego State University in order to write full-time.
His ex-wife Joan D. Vinge is also an accomplished science fiction author.
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