Berner Vinge, a mathematician and prolific science fiction writer, wrote a novella in the 1980s that offers a glimpse into the early world known as cyberspace, shortly after artificial intelligence He was the person who hypothesized that the intelligence of humans exceeds that of humans.He died on March 20th in Los Angeles. San Diego's Jola neighborhood. He was 79 years old.
James Frenkel, who has edited nearly all of his work since 1981, said Parkinson's disease was the cause of his death in a nursing home.
David Brin, a science fiction writer and friend of Mr. Binge, paid tribute on Facebook, saying, “Varner was made more vivid by his erudite mastery of language, drama, character, and its implications. “It captivated millions of people with stories of a possible tomorrow.” of science. ”
Mr. Vinge (pronounced “Vingee'') created an early version of cyberspace (a virtual reality technology he called “The Other Plane'') a year before William Gibson published his book “True Name.'' ” (1981). His early digital ecosystem was given the name “Burning Chrome” in the story, and the term was popularized three years later in his novel “Neuromancer.”
In “True Names,” Mr. Slippery, an anonymous computer hacker known as a warlock who operates in another dimension, is identified and captured by the government (the “great enemy”) and is exposed to an extradimensional threat. You will be asked to help stop it. Magician.
In a 2001 feature on Mr. Vinge, New York Times technology reporter Katie Haffner wrote that “True Names” was “an introduction to pseudonymous characters and other elements of online life that now seem almost retrograde.” It depicts a world in which there is an epidemic.” Looking back, he added, the book was “prophetic.”
Mr. Vinge's immersion in computers at San Diego State University, where he began teaching in 1972, led to his vision of a “technological singularity,” a tipping point where machine intelligence reaches and exceeds human intelligence. I started to embrace it.
He described an early version of his vision in a 1983 Omni magazine article.
“We are now at a stage where we are accelerating the evolution of intelligence itself,” he wrote, adding, “Whether our research is cast in silicon or DNA, the final outcome will be “It has almost no effect,” he added. He argues that the moment of intellectual transition will be “as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole,” and that at that moment “the world will pass far beyond our understanding.” It is written.
Ten years later, he crystallized the intellectual transition, or singularity, in a paper for a symposium sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute (subtitled “How to Survive the Posthuman Era''). .
“Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will come to an end. Are such advances inevitable? Avoid Even if we can’t, can we steer events in a way that allows us to survive?”
Although this prediction did not come true, advances in artificial intelligence are accelerating to the point where some fear that it will be replaced by artificial intelligence.
Frenkel said that Vinge used the concept of the singularity in his “Zones of Thought” series, which is a superintelligent entity that exists in a part of the galaxy called Transcend.
“They are pure thinking entities,” Frenkel said in a phone interview. “They are very powerful. Some are benevolent, others malicious.”
Two novels in that series, A Fire Upon the Deep (1993) and A Deepness in the Sky (2000), won the science fiction genre's highest honor, the Hugo Award. Mr. Binge also won Hugos awards for another novel, “Rainbow’s End” (2007), and the novellas “Fast Times at Fairmont High” (2002) and “Cookie Monster” (2004).
Peter Schwartz reviewed “A Fire Upon the Deep'' in Wired magazine, writing: “Not since William Gibson gave us a fully realized world of cyberspace in Neuromancer has anyone given us such a rich array of new ideas. Imagine a universe where the laws of physics change.
Berner Stephen Vinge was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on October 2, 1944, and moved with his family to East Lansing, Michigan, where his father, Clarence, taught geography at Michigan State University. His mother, Ada Grace (Roland) Vinge, was a geographer who wrote two books with her husband.
Mr. Vinge graduated from Michigan State University in 1966 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics, and went on to earn a master's degree and a Ph.D. He studied the same subject at the University of California, San Diego in 1968 and he in 1971. He began teaching mathematics at San Diego State University in his 1972 year, but eventually turned to computer science after he began “playing with real computers” in the early 1970s. he told the Times. He retired in 2000 to concentrate on his writing career.
“Mr. Varner loved teaching and was popular with his students, but he only had the time between semesters (usually in the summer) to actually write,” said Binge, a professor in the computer science department at San Diego State University. His colleague John Carroll said: The executor of his estate wrote in an email: “Something had to give, and his teachings could have been done by others, but the increase in novels and ideas was invaluable.”
Mr. Vinge's first published short story, “Apartness,” appeared in New World magazine in 1965. Four years later, he published his first novel, “The World of Grimm.” This work revolves around his science fiction magazine from 700 years ago. Huge barges that travel around the earth are the source of the world's technological progress.
He married Joan Dennison in 1972. That marriage ended in divorce after seven years, but they remained friends. As Joan Vinge, she has won five Hugo Awards. She married editor Mr. Frenkel in 1980.
Mr. Vinge's sister, Patricia Vinge, is the only survivor.
Mr. Vinge was teaching networks and operating systems when he came up with the idea for “True Names.” He used an early form of instant messaging called Talk in his late 1970s when he tried to find out each other's names with another user.
“Finally I gave up and told the other person that I had to go. I was actually a personality simulator, and if I kept talking, my artificial nature would be revealed,” he said in a 2001 Times article. he reportedly said. “Then I realized that I had been living in a science fiction story.”
Mr. Vinge occasionally returned to the topic of singularities.
When interviewed on NPR's “Fresh Air” in 2000, he said that some of his prophecies were inspired by Moore's Law. Moore's Law was proposed in 1965 by Gordon Moore, then head of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor, and later the company's head of research and development. Founder of Intel. It states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits will double every year, increasing computing power exponentially, without significantly increasing costs. Mr. Moore later revised it to every two years.
The logical conclusion of Moore's Law, Binge said, is that “assuming someone can program it,” “we'll reach a tipping point” where computers will become as intellectually powerful as humans. was.