vernor vinge

David Pfau @pfau · 11h
I am absolutely begging anyone who works in tech who uses the term "singularity" to actually read Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. It doesn't just mean "wow there's a lot of progress in this one particular technology driving a massive capital cycle".
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roon @tszzl · 3h
I have read both of course and it seems like... we're in the singularity
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roon @tszzl · 3h
vinge describes 4 singularities, and we are obviously in the first where machines alone are achieving superintelligence through rapid increasingly self propelled iteration. we are also nearing his epistemic horizon moment where the future is getting extremely hard to foresee—all my friends keep talking about their "error bars"—and in the throes of loss of control

kurzweil's vision is even closer to what you call "capital cycle" of course, being grounded in flop counts and massive compute buildouts resulting in superintelligence at a certain threshold where machine flops pass biological flops however you do the soft accounting

"The economy reorganizes itself around rapidly improving machine intelligence"

it seems like you are invoking these primary texts as status objects while having no real disagreement with the broader tech culture's understanding of the singularity

singularityvernor vingeray kurzweilroonai forecastingloss of control

Wei Dai @weidai11 · 1h
What? My big puzzle is why so few people took Vinge's insights seriously, like does anyone know of a second person who went into cryptography or computer security after reading his books/essays, in order to help prevent a similar future scenario?

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦 @Noahpini... · 8h
Replying to @kingharis
Not a weird take at all. It just takes the unusual mental ability of being able to read those stories and not immediately think "OMG, VERNOR VINGE STORIES ARE REAL!!!!".

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Ethan Mollick @emollick

2026-08-07 — saved image

Ethan Mollick @emollick · 7h
We are as @sebkrier points out, in a Vingean soft take-off scenario at a minimum. Even the most AI skeptical observers expect AGI/ASI to be achieved & diffused in less than a century at this point

[quoted book page image]
370  Vernor Vinge

  Whether foresight and good planning can make any difference may depend on whether the technological Singularity comes as a "hard takeoff" or a "soft takeoff." A hard takeoff is one in which the transition to superhuman control takes just a few hundred hours (as in Greg Bear's "Blood Music"). It seems to me that hard takeoffs would be very hard to plan for; they would be like the avalanches I speak of here in the 1993 essay. The most nightmarish form of a hard take-off might be one arising from an arms race, with two nation-states racing forward with their separate "manhattan projects" for superhuman power. The equivalent of decades of human-level espionage might be compressed into the last few hours of the race, and all human control and judgment surrendered to some very destructive goals.
  On the other hand, a soft takeoff is a transition that takes decades, perhaps more than a century. This situation seems much more amenable to planning and to thoughtful experimentation. Hans Moravec discusses such a soft transition in Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.
  Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is.

ai safetysingularitytakeoff scenariosvernor vingetwitter