Hello everyone welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll and as I'm recording this in March of 2024 a few days ago

Werner Vinge passed away. You might know Werner Vinge was a quite well-known science fiction author, the author of A Fire

Upon the Deep, and other novels. Basically, his favorite thing to do was to take technology and to extrapolate it, to imagine technological innovations

far beyond what we have in the present day and then to think about the implications

of those technological innovations for humanity, human behavior, and society and life and so forth.

Yes, something that science fiction has always been very good at.

In fact, even if you've never read any of his books, you might be aware of the impact of Werner Venge because he was the one who popularized the idea of the technological singularity, a moment when advances in technology would become so big that a fundamental change would happen

in the nature of human existence.

He did not coin the term, singularity, not quite, not in this sense. It goes back to John Von Neumann of all people,

maybe not surprising actually in retrospect. Von Neumann was one of the leading mathematicians

and physicists and thinkers of the 20th century,

and if you look up the Wikipedia page

for the technological singularity,

you will find something I did know

that it was first mentioned in a kind of offhand remark by John

von Neumann talking to Ullum and mentioning that with the humanity was

approaching an essential singularity and technological progress.

Now since then this idea has been borrowed by others most famously by Ray Kortsvile and it has gained a little bit of, well there's enthusiasm for it in some quarters,

there's skepticism about it in other quarters.

The specific version of the technological singularity that Vinge and Kurtzweil were talking about.

We don't know exactly what Von Neumann was talking about, but Vinge and then Kurtzweil were talking

about a technological singularity driven by AI superintelligence.

...