Vernor Vinge has made a career out of peering into the future -- both as an academic and as a science-fiction author.
Some have credited Mr. Vinge with being one of the first to imagine a shared virtual space created by computer networks. Though he did not use the term “cyberspace” -- which was coined by another science-fiction author, William Gibson, in 1984 -- Mr. Vinge’s 1981 novella, True Names, seems to have predicted the wired realm we have entered. It described a world where people could plug into online gathering places and live out alternate lives, while carefully guarding their real-world identities.
Mr. Vinge, a professor emeritus of mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University, has also written essays and given lectures on his visions of the future of computing. Perhaps his most radical prediction is that computers will become smarter than humans within the next 20 years.
He has written several science-fiction novels and short stories, including his most recent novel, A Deepness in the Sky (St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
Q. You’ve written that researchers are on the verge of creating computers that surpass humans in intelligence. Briefly, how do you see this playing out?
A. I still think it’s one of the most likely scenarios for the next 20 years or so, and the reasoning is based on a couple of things. One is just Moore’s Law [which holds that the power of computer hardware doubles every 18 months].
The question is, How hardware-powerful are we? And this is open to profound debate. But we have 40 to 100 billion neurons, I guess. They’re sort of like microprocessors themselves. ... If you think that a single neuron is on the order of a microprocessor, then a person can actually just take that and crank that into the Moore’s Law trend line. And if you do, you come up with machines that have the computational power of a human being ... in the next 20 years or so.
However, the real question is, What happens a year after that, or two years after that, or three years after that? This argument appears to make it a plausible scenario that there would be critters running around substantially smarter than we are. ... It would mean that we’re no longer at center stage.
Q. Is this a dystopian vision?
A. It’s unclear what the implications of this are. ... It is a very unsettling thing, but ... it’s not clear that it is dystopic. And in fact, one thing the optimists would like is that we would be participants. There are plenty of people working on the whole issue of computer-human interactions and computer-human interfaces. If you look at it that way, you could look at the computer stuff as sort of a neo-neo cortex.
Q. So an extension of the human mind, essentially?
A. Yes. If you look at it that way, we just become better, smarter, more creative.
Q. What are the implications for higher education? What do you think universities will be like in 15 to 20 years?
A. The near-future things are going to be relatively uncomfortable for organized education. I think that there are many things that the Internet and distance learning can do very effectively. And as a form of economic competition, it is definitely going to stir things up. ... I think what comes out of it all will be very helpful to society as a whole.
In the longer run, it’s conceivable that we might actually get some of the classic fantasies of being able to learn things as an operational act -- you know, “You walk in. You walk out. Now you know it.” However, if that were to happen, I think it has a consequence that makes sense to the people who think it’s unrealistic, and that is, learning anything that is complex means that a person has to change.
Take a fairly extreme case: learn a language you don’t now know. Suppose I wanted to learn Japanese. Suppose this could be done in a sort of magical way of just imprinting the Japanese on me. ... Human language comes fairly close to capturing what it is to be a person. And if you really could learn a different language in that sort of downloaded way, it would actually, it seems to me, entail approximately the personality and outlook changes that would happen if you had taken the years necessary to become fluent in the language.
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