A few observations from Vernor Vinge’s talk at the Long Now Foundation:
- I was hoping he’d speak to Sterling’s critique of The Singularity™, and he proposed three singularity-free future histories.
- We go off the rails, most everyone dies in an afternoon, and the survivors slouch towards extinction.
- We ease into 50,000 years or so of pleasantness before we evolve into something different.
- We loop through cycles of rapid catastrophe and gradual recovery and growth. In that scenario, the archeologists and librarians become real heroes.
- He says having long-lived or immortal elders around would be a good thing.
- Making space travel cheaper would be another good thing. The future, even if we start being nicer to each other, is uncertain. Offworld human colonies would be a good thing in case of one the bad scenarios.
- He’s impressed with Wikipedia, and says that lots of people talking online might approach something that looks like tolerance. I don’t know if he heard about Donohoe’s drive-by on Pandagon, then.
- Openness is a good thing. The one scenario he kept returning to as the one that scares him is an arms race, run in secret, to get an advantage with potentially lethal technology, where both sides cut corners on safety and prudence in order to stay ahead of their adversary.
