Wired.com presents the Geek's guide to the Galaxy and here are your hosts. John Joseph Adams and David Barr

Kirtley.

Hi this is David and this is John and welcome to episode 56 of Geek's Guide to the

Galaxy. Our guest today is Werner Vinci. His 1981 Novella True Names was one of the first science fiction stories to explore the concept of virtual reality, and he also coined the phrase, the technological singularity, which describes a point in the future at which technology creates

intelligences beyond our comprehension. His novels A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in

the Sky, and Rainbows End all won the Hugo Award, and his latest novel The Children of the Sky is out now.

All right, well let's get to our interview.

All right, so we're here with Werner Vinci.

Welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you, Dave.

Okay, so you're famous for coining the phrase,

the technological singularity.

How did you first come up with that?

I used that term first, I think,

an artificial intelligence conference in

1982. Actually this was a conference that was Marvin Minsky, a famous AI researcher,

and several science fiction writers,

were on the panel, Robert Sheckley, and Jim Hogan.

And I made the observation that if we got human level artificial intelligence,

you know that would certainly be a world-shaking event,

if we got superhuman level intelligence, then what happened afterwards would be fundamentally

unintelligible.

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