I would give Vernor Vinge a bit more credit. He was a professor of computer science as well as a novelist in 1993. His “A Fire Upon the Deep”, published in 1992, featured a super-intelligent AI (called the Blight) that posed an existential threat to a galactic civilization. (I wonder if Eliezer had been introduced to the Singularity through that book instead of “True Names”, he would have invented the FAI idea several years earlier.)
It was Vinge, however, who popularized the technological singularity
and significantly elaborated on it, exploring pretty much all the obvious
related topics, such as accelerating change, computational speed
explosion, potential delays of the singularity, obstacles to the singularity,
limits of predictability and negotiability of the singularity, evil
vs benign super-intelligence, surviving the singularity, etc.
Luke, can you please also add “professor of computer science” to the post to describe Vernor Vinge? Apparently “It’s straight out of science fiction” is a major reason for people to dismiss AI risk, so adding “professor of computer science” to “novelist” would probably help a lot in that regard.
I would give Vernor Vinge a bit more credit. He was a professor of computer science as well as a novelist in 1993. His “A Fire Upon the Deep”, published in 1992, featured a super-intelligent AI (called the Blight) that posed an existential threat to a galactic civilization. (I wonder if Eliezer had been introduced to the Singularity through that book instead of “True Names”, he would have invented the FAI idea several years earlier.)
To quote Schmidhuber:
Updated.
Luke, can you please also add “professor of computer science” to the post to describe Vernor Vinge? Apparently “It’s straight out of science fiction” is a major reason for people to dismiss AI risk, so adding “professor of computer science” to “novelist” would probably help a lot in that regard.