Oh man, I sincerely hope he was signed up for cryonics. If there was someone who deserved to see what the future holds, it was him.
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Vernor Vinge has died
171–180 of 334 posts
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#172He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all. >The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a techn…
> He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.
Being surprised is also an exciting outcome. Was he thinking about that too?
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that the "Singularity" turns up in the novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is one of the best pretenses…
I'm also a bit sceptical of an intelligence explosion but compute per dollar has increased in a steady exponential way long before Moore's law and will probably continue after it. There are ways to progress other than shrinking transistors.
Even though we understand a lot more about how LLMs work and have cut resource consumption dramatically in the last year we still know hardly anything so it seems quite likely there is a better way to do it.
For one thing dense vectors for language seem kinda insane to me. Change one pixel in a picture and it makes no difference to the meaning. Change one letter in a sentence and you can change the meaning completely so a continuous representation seems fundamentally wrong.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think connections count as flops. If a neuron only fires 5-50 times a second then that'd put the human brain at .5 to 5 teraflops it seems to me. That assumes that you can represent all of the useful parts of the decision about whether to fire or not to fire in the equivalent of one floating point operation, which seems to be an optimistic assumption. It also assumes there's no useful information encoded in…
Imagine that there's a little computer inside each neuron that decides when it needs to do work. Those computers are an implementation detail of the flops being provided by neurons, and would not increase the overall flop count, since that'd be counting them twice. For example, how would you measure the speed of a game boy emulator? Would you take into consideration all the instructions the emulator itself needs to r…
Already considered in my comment.
> Imagine that there's a little computer inside each neuron that decides when it needs to do work
Yah, there's -bajillions- of floating point operation equivalents happening in a neuron deciding what to do. They're probably not all functional.
BUT, that's why I said the "useful parts" of the decision:
It may take more than the equivalent of one floating point operation to decide whether to fire. For instance, if you are weighting multiple inputs to the neuron differently to decide whether to fire now, that would require multiple multiplications of those inputs. If you consider whether you have fired recently, that's more work too.
Neurons do all of these things, and more, and these things are known to be functional-- not mere implementation details. A computer cannot make an equivalent choice in one floating point operation.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the brain is optimal-- perhaps you can do far less work. But if we're going to use it as a model to estimate scale, we have to consider what actual equivalent work is.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#175Please mirror, because more people should have a copy of this: https://3e.org/vvannot This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.
I actually read a Fire Upon The Deep over Christmas, and then went on with the rest. The entire trilogy is pretty amazing.
I really wish he had wrapped everything up.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#176This makes me so sad. He was my favorite sci-fi author. I was looking forward to more books in the Fire Upon The Deep and Deepness In The Sky universe.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to clarify, the “singularity” conjectures a slightly different and more interesting phenomenon, one driven by technological advances, true, but its definition was not those advances. It was more the second derivative of future shock: technologies and culture that enabled and encouraged faster and faster change until the curve bent essentially vertical…asymptotimg to a mathematical singularity. An example my he s…
Note that the "Singularity" turns up in the novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is one of the best pretenses…
IMHO Marooned in Realtime is the best Vinge book. Besides being a dual mystery novel, it really explores the implications of bobble technology and how just a few hours of technology development near the singularity can be extreme.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept predates von Neuman. First known person to present the idea was mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet in the late 1700s. Not surprising, because he also laid out most ideals and values of modern liberal democracy as they are now. Amazing philosopher. He basically invented the idea of ensemble learning (known as boosting in machine learning). Nicolas de Condorcet and the First Intelligence Exp…
That essay is written by a political scientist. His arguments aren't very persuasive. Even if they were, he doesn't actually cite the person he's writing about, so I have no way to check the primary materials. It's not like this is uncommon either. Everyone who's smart since 1760 has extrapolated the industrial revolution and imagined something similar to the singularity. Malthus would be a bad example and Nietzsche…
There are some quotes but they guy seems to be talking about improving humans rather than anything AI like:
"...natural [human] faculties themselves and this [human body] organisation could also be improved?"
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that the "Singularity" turns up in the novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is one of the best pretenses…
IMHO Marooned in Realtime is the best Vinge book. Besides being a dual mystery novel, it really explores the implications of bobble technology and how just a few hours of technology development near the singularity can be extreme.
Yep. I like it better than Fire Upon the Deep but I do like both of them. I didn’t like A Deepness in the Sky as it was feeling kinda grindy like Dune. (I wish we could just erase Dune so people could enjoy all of Frank Herbert’s other novels of which I love even the bad ones)
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#180One of the true greats. True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote. Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer ). RIP
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