Vernor Vinge Is Optimistic About the Collapse of Civilization
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/03/vernor-vinge-geeks-guide-galaxy/
I like Mr. Vinge a lot as an author (I would love to hang out with him and find out if he is as cool in person). I loved his books based on the ‘bobble’ and the ability to do time travel (only into the future); see The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. What I got most out of those books was the idea of the Technological singularity. I had thought of such ideas myself before reading his books as I had read an article someplace decades ago that plotted technology achievements vs time and it was crystal clear from looking at the graph that, likely in my lifetime, the slope of the line was going to become infinite. Having recently been in geometry classes I knew that weird things could happen when slopes became infinite and I was already pondering what would happen ‘after’. While it is possible that the slope could reverse its increasing rate, we could go through an inflection point, and then stagnate our way into infinity, I am of the opinion (perhaps because I have watched too much Star Trek and read too much SciFi) that if we can conceive of it (as a species) we can do it. Since there are loads of things we haven’t even conceived of yet I have a firm belief that there are one of two options for us (as a species) going forward: we blast ourselves out of existence or we cross the singularity. When such an event occurs I don’t have any meaningful predictions other than I believe it will occur in my life (largely because I am still convinced that life extending technology will arrive while I am still young enough to take advantage of it).
We are, of course, developing all sorts of ways to destroy ourselves, but in that area I have confidence that we won’t be able to achieve the magnitude necessary to actually eliminate the species and much like Vinge comments in the article, I would expect even a catastrophic 99.9% reduction in human population to result in nothing more than a wee blip in our continued travel along the path to the singularity.
As much as I would rather explore space and travel the galaxy (which in my analysis requires some sort of implausible dramatic advancement in a single technology without the parallel advancement of all other technologies), I expect I will happily engage in effort to help race toward the singularity and might actually greet it with enthusiasm. Perhaps there is amazing stuff on the other side and my curiosity to know will probably be too great to resist. Unlike my early blather about the looming Apocalypse (which really boils down to extended extreme discomfort rather than the Biblical disaster so often seen in movies), this I do see as inevitable and not too distant in the future. Unlike the apocalypse which I want to avoid it at all possible, I am unable to make up my mind about the singularity. As Vinge suggests, how can a zygote have any meaningful thoughts about what it means to be an adult human?
