>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> I first encountered the work
of our next speaker in 1981,
in other words before
many of you were born, um,
through his work True
Names, which if anyone
in the audience is
familiar with the genre
of cyber punk it was the first
work to really not only define
in popular fiction the
concept of the singularity,
the melding of the human mind
with a computer system but was one
of the most influential
works that actually brought
about the whole genre and the
idea of the internet and the web.
I next encountered his
work, not for many,
many years when I was presented with
a copy of his book, Rainbow's End,
when I was working with a
mass digitization project
and encountered the concept of
destroying books to digitize them,
which is not what we've been
doing at the library of Congress
with our book digitization.
Oh, somebody about
the book digitization.
But the works of his that I must say
that I love the most are his works,
Fire Upon the Deep, Deepness in
the Sky and his newest novel,
Children of the Sky in which
he presents a type of culture
that is unlike any other in which
a group of beings exist as one
and share a shared consciousness
and the encountering of this type
of culture by the human race
in deep space many, many,
many centuries into the future.
Vernor Vinge is an award winning
author; he won Hugo awards
for Fire Upon the Deep, for Deepness
in the Sky and for Rainbow's End.
He is a retired professor
of mathematics
from San Diego State University
and it is my very extreme,
personal pleasure to introduce
Vernor Vinge to you today.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you Leslie, certainly
a great pleasure to be here
at the National Book Festival
and a great honor to be here.
So I was thinking to say a
few things about my career
in science fiction and
where I got started
and what I think is important
about science fiction.
I think like most intense science
fiction readers I got started
when I was quite young.
I remember as a child the world was
a different place than it is now,
which we all...is not surprising.
But there was one aspect to it
that I'm not sure is clearly talked
about a lot and that is when I was
young, when I first started looking
at stories I noticed something that
seemed to be true of the stories
that I would see on television
and this is actually before I
could really read so I'm not sure
about books at first and that was
that stories had the characteristic
that the world was the same
at the end of the story,
maybe not for the characters in the
story who might have fallen in love
or something like that but for
the world as a whole as a whole.
The world was the same at the end of
the story as it was at the beginning
of the story and I'm not
quite sure why it is true
that this really upset me since
my childhood was quite happy
but it did upset me so I would
look around and try to find stories
where the world was different
at the end of the story
than at the beginning of the story.
There were occasional
cases where that was true,
however most of them
turned out to be fraudulent,
for instance it would
turn out that the change
that had happened during the
story was really just a dream
and the character wakes up and
really the world is the same
as it was at the beginning
of the story.
I did find that there was one
characteristic of stories,
very rare stories that I would
find where the world was different
at the end of the story from
the beginning of the story
and that was generally associated
with the word science fiction
and so I began to search out
stories that fell under that term
and it's probably not a good or
a healthy thing but virtually all
of the extracurricular
reading that I did
as a child was science fiction.
Now a days of course the world is
expected to be different at the end
of every year that it was at the
beginning of the year so it's not
such a big deal now and
science fiction is not quite the
encapsulated corner literature
that it was in the 1950's,
although there are still aspects of
it that are very much in a corner
and the stuff that is generally
popular has its own characteristics.
But that is where I initially
came into science fiction.
I think that nowadays more and more
science fiction is very important
and it has certain roles in
society and so I'd like to kind
of list those and I think some
of them are actually false claims
and some of them are true.
One is the claim that
science fiction is important
because it predicts the future
and actually I don't think
that is true any more than if you
had a million monkeys typing away
that some of the monkeys would
get things that are right.
If you cherry pick the science
fiction story that you want to read
or you cherry pick the parts of
a story that you want to talk
about you can make stories
that look very prophetic.
I had written stories that if
you pick just the right parts
of them it looks like I must
have had a perfect crystal ball
and if you look at the
other parts you may conclude
that I was really an idiot.
So I don't think prediction
really is the...a true virtue
of science fiction.
There is one virtue of
science fiction I think
that is almost indisputable
and that is
that science fiction can
be a very powerful tool
to encourage young people
to get into science.
I meet a lot of scientists,
adult scientist
who actually don't
read science fiction
but in most cases I think
science fiction was important
to them before they...while
they were young
and before they super busy with
the science that they are doing now
and of course there
are adult scientist
who are still quite interested in
continuing to read science fiction
so that particular limited role of
science fiction I think is very,
very important, very, very valid.
There is another virtue of science
fiction that I think is important
and will become more important in
the future which sort of raises
and interesting question and that
is how science fiction might change
in the future.
One thing about science fiction is
that it allows us, not in the sense
of predicting the future but in the
sense of planning for the future,
science fiction allows us to
consider different scenarios
and by a scenario I mean imagining
some logically coherent vision
of the future that you don't claim
is the way things are necessarily
going to happen but you claim its
internally consistent but it depends
on a small number of perhaps
surprising possibilities
and then you follow through
on those consequences
and then write an interesting
story based on that.
That I think is very, very
important for several reasons,
the most important reason is
that nobody knows what
the future is going to be
but we do know the future
will probably be different
than things are now and being
able to work on that is important,
since we don't know what
the future is going to be
in trusting anybody whether they
are a science fiction writer
or a politician or a
scientist in trusting anybody
to predict the future is
almost a sure fire guarantee
that you are going to be wrong
because there are a very
large number of things
that possibly could happen
and zeroing in on one of them
and spending all your resource
on guarding against the bad parts
of that prediction and
profiting on the good parts
of that prediction
is a very long bet.
So I think most people whether or
not they're science fiction readers
or not should look at the future in
terms of different classes of things
that could happen and the beauty
of looking at things in terms
of scenarios is that you're in a
situation there that as times goes
by you can look at public
events and technological events
and you can compare them, not
just to one vision of the future
but to all the scenarios that you've
been considering and you'll find
that some of the things that have
happened increase the probability
of some scenarios, they may decrease
the probability of other scenarios
and they may suggest
new scenarios entirely.
That process of looking at events in
terms of different scenarios means
that you the user of scenarios is
going to be alert to possibilities
that you would not have been alert
to if you had only had one true
vision of the future in your mind.
Similarly when it comes
time to planning
like what you're going to...what
sort of precautions you're going
to take, where you are going
to invest in the future,
where you want society to invest in
the future, those all can be done
in terms of reacting
to the different possibilities
about that future.
So as times goes on you can
reallocate resources depending
on what you figure
is going to happen.
It's not surprising that scenarios
actually are very big outside
of science fiction nowadays,
I think...and I think it's an
entirely healthy thing that a lot
of very large organizations both
inside of government and outside
of government use scenario based
planning nowadays and it's a lot
of fun for science fiction
writers because these organizations
like to invite science fiction
writers...they like to have
at least one crazy person on
their committees that can talk
about crazy things
that could happen.
I've overlooked one thing about
science fiction that is independent
of scenarios and is in a way
independent of other things
that I said were virtues of
science fiction and that is
that science fiction is as
it should be entertainment.
When I write that actually is or
should be I think the top motive
that I have, how to write something
that's going to be entertaining
to the maximum number of people.
I think forgetting that is actually
a mistake, if you forget that,
if you seriously are not
interested in entertaining people
and you're only interested
in preaching to people,
in that case you probably should be
working for one of these commercial
or government organizations
that just does serious planning.
There is also a virtue, a separate
virtue that's sort of sneaky
about writing to entertain and
that is if you write to entertain
and you succeed then you
actually have a bunch of people
who are reading your stories who
are willing to give you the benefit
of the doubt, this is called
and you probably heard the term the
willing suspension of disbelief used
in connection with science fiction.
If a really smart person likes your
story when they see you do something
that they know is incorrect
but they like the story,
they will say wow why did he
do that, what was he thinking,
what explanation could there be
for this apparent inconsistency
in this person's story.
So sometimes I run into
very, very smart people,
people who are much smarter than
I and have much deeper background
in various things, they'll come up
to me and say oh I love this story
and especially such and
such a point where you saw
that in fact this thing
that is apparently a
mistake is really an evidence
of a very profound point
that I discovered once I
was reading your story.
You really are smart to be able
to figure that out and I said oh,
well I'm glad you were able to
see that point...yes what was
that you can help me and give me
some references about that point.
Now the flip side of that
is that if you write a story
that is not entertaining and
it's being read by someone
who is very smart, when those people
see something wrong then there is
nothing you can do for the
rest of the story that's right.
No matter what you say they
are smart enough to think
of a reason why what you
said was actually baloney.
This is a virtue that we who
are writing official fiction,
it's a virtue that we have over
the people in these commercial
and government committees
that do scenario planning
because they do not have the
obligation to entertain anybody
and so they, except for a very small
fraction of humans who are capable
of being smart and
trying it interpolate even
when they don't...aren't
entertained,
these nonfiction scenario based
planning people are giving
up really a substantial advantage
that we fiction writers have.
As I've been writing...most
of my writing career has really
concentrated on two general classes
of scenarios, and one of them is
space travel, that's the one I grew
up with and was probably
my first love
and for me it's really the greatest
technological disappointment
of my life that we do not have
independent space colonies
out there in this year 2012.
On the other hand I think
that actually barring disaster
that the 21st century is going to be
a very big century for space travel
and I think a lot of the science
fiction that happened in the 1950's
in some sense going to happen in
the 21st century and I look forward
to it very much and as you
know from Leslie's introduction
or from your own reading of my
stories, I write a lot of stories
about space travel, not as many
about solar system near future
space travels I would like to do
but interstellar space travel
I've actually written quite a bit.
The other big theme which to me sort
of grew up out of the late 1950's
and early 1960's was the
feeling that technology was going
to create certain classes
of inventions
that making inventions
easier to do and that sort
of Meta invention is
improvements in cognition,
that is in the ability
of mind to think.
As the years have passed I've become
more and more convinced of that
and I think that that progress
is proceeding like gangbusters
and you hear a lot about that
now days from people talking
about the technological singularity.
I think one thing that most people
don't...that some people don't get
about the singularity scenario is
that they're actually a
bunch of sub scenarios.
One of the things that
makes me more confident
that the technological
singularity that is the rise
of super human intelligence is going
to happen is there are these
different way that it could happen.
It could happen the way we perhaps
originally imagined which is just
with super smart computers,
it could happen with computers
that make humans smarter, that is
humans plus computers could think
of it as sort of a neo-neo
cortex for the human brain
that makes us much, much smarter.
Another way that this could happen
is the internet plus humanity using
the internet and right now I think
in 2012 that particular angle
for getting the super human
intelligence is really very striking
and if you read in the right
places about crowd sourcing
and the fold it project
and the Duolingo project,
if you Google on those things
that these are prospects
where you can actually
see that the ensemble
of humanity plus the machines
is already considerably smarter
than any intellectual institution in
the world short of all of humanity
and it's certainly more powerful
than any intellectual
institution of the past.
It should give us a lot of
optimism about the future
and for the other prospects
of the singularity.
There are other ways that
the singularity could happen
that I would do a regular
talk about the singularity
but the main point is that it's
happening a lot of different ways
and short of physical
disaster I think
that it probably will
happen by 2030.
How does this fit with
space travel...well
if the singularity doesn't happen I
think the space travel stuff becomes
much, much more important because
we need it for our human survival,
we don't want to be trapped
on one planet considering
the technology that we have.
If the singularity does happen then
I think we'll also get space travel
but we humans will only be part of
the enterprise and there are lots
of really fun science fiction book
you can read about that possibility.
If you're familiar with the
writer Ian Banks, I-a-n B-a-n-k-s,
he's written a lot of
space opera stories
and his general series is called
the culture, the culture stories
and in those stories there
are interstellar spaceships
and overtly it looks like your
classical space opera science
fiction story but if you read it
closely you realize that the crew,
the human crew of the star ships
are really a lot more or less
like the ships pet dog, they're
along to keep the machines
that run the star ship which are
much smarter than any of the humans,
they're along to keep them
company and to provide a good time
and occasionally they're
along because the mines
that run the spaceship need a canary
for some mine and that they have
to decide whether the
mine is dangerous enough
and so the crew gets to go down
to the planet and take risks
that the machine running the
star ship is not willing to take.
That occasionally comes
up and that's not much fun
but it's still probably
safer than the shipping
out on the star ship Enterprise.
So those are the sorts of things
that I see in the near future,
in the farther future
science fiction I
like to say is the
first occupational group
that has been impacted by the
technological singularity.
If you are a science
fiction writer who likes
to write hard science fiction, hard
science fiction is science fiction
about things you think are
plausible, you try to work
out the science in
some plausible way.
If you write that time of
science fiction and if you believe
that the technological
singularity is going
to happen then it's very hard to
write a story that takes place
after that point in time.
The Ian Banks example that
described as one way of doing it,
but other than things like that
it's hard to imagine a story
that has human sized heros and very
few people are going to believe you
if you write a story
from the standpoint
of super humanly competent hero
because the audience is
not super human nowadays
and the author is not
super human nowadays.
So this is actually been a very big
barrier to writing science fiction
and I like to think as time goes
by and we actually do get closer
and closer to singularity
that we're going
to see science fiction itself
begin to change, not change just
in reacting to the possibility the
singularity but change in the topics
that it deals with and
ultimately changing
with the way that it deals with it.
I've often thought that art goes
through sort of a trajectory,
imagine what it would be like
if you were an early human
and you decided you wanted to
become a comedian, almost any joke
that you would tell
would be hilarious
and you would be the first
person who ever told it,
imagine what it would be
like to be the first person
who ever told a travelling
salesman joke.
You can't go wrong, on the
other hand if you fast forward
to the 21st century where we have
thanks to the library of Congress,
we have very good records
of the past, we have records
of all the jokes that there
are probably records of,
if your job then is to say something
funny you often are reduced
to doing little tweaks and
variations on the past.
Think about what western
movies are like nowadays,
cowboy western movies are like,
that's a similar sort of problem
in that you have a whole century
of people working on the tropes,
so one really kind of cool
thing about the singularity
if you were an early post human
writer is that you would be
like those early humans, the
first human to ever tell a joke,
the fist human to ever
tell an adventure story
or tell a romance story.
In the early singularity eras the
early post humans will be the first
ones to write these new types of
art and although it may be difficult
for us to participate in them I
sort of admire them and envy them
for being able to be groundbreaking
on things that are happening
for the first time that
is in the post human era.
Well, I think that I will leave
off there and take any questions
that anybody has for the
rest of my time, thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Is it on...hello
could talk a little bit
about your writing process,
do you write long hand,
do you type, is it 9 to 5?
>> Ah, so a question
about my writing process.
First of all I should say that
I'm interested in that in a number
of ways like I nowadays I often
get to talk to other writers
and I like to ask them
exactly that question
and one thing I've learned is
that they're really are a lot
of different styles that
different people...work styles
that people have so I
think I'm not very unusual
but if what I say is not at all what
you do when you write it just means
that we're in different work styles.
My particular style is oriented
around my peculiar disability
and this is I have a writer's block.
You hear about people who have had
a writer's block for a whole month
or a whole year, I've had a
writer's block now for 67 years.
If you're in that situation it takes
a real effort to write a first draft
so basically the type of style that
I have now is that if I'm actually
in writing mode where I'm supposed
to be writing I, at the beginning
of the day and I do use the word
processor by the way and I regard it
as very important and very
useful to me but at the beginning
of the day the rule is that I
can quit for the day as soon
as I had written five
pages, that is as soon
as my word processor
counts 1,500 new words.
It doesn't...and it's very important
that it doesn't matter how bad
that writing is because
if I factored quality
into this you know it wouldn't work
so no matter how bad it is as soon
as I can write 1,500 words I'm done
for the day, that's the only thing
that gets me through the day.
>> My impression of the singularity
is that the whole idea is
that progress would keep
getting faster and faster
until it reaches sort of a vertical
asymptote and it seems to me
that progress has actually
been slowing down,
that there's been a lot less change
at least in American daily life
in the last 50 years say than
in the 50 years before that.
That there's really
been almost nothing new
in the last 50 years other than
internet, computers and cell phones.
>> I think that a good
argument...the argument
that there was more
technological change earlier
than there has been recently.
If a person looks at the right
features I think a good argument can
be made to support the contention
that you're making I disagree
with the overall conclusion
and I could cherry
pick...I could cherry pick
to support my contention.
I think that actually the
internet so far is comparable
to the most recent thing...well,
is comparable to the rise of speech
and apprenticeships in human
civilization, so there are things
that are going on that I
think are related to intellect
and that our very powerful similarly
with what we're seeing
with automation.
But I take your point and I
think that we're going to have
to watch the next few years and
see what happens in terms of speed
of prototyping, speed
of manufacturing,
the rise of automation
within manufacturing,
that there's certain thing we can
look at...there's certain symptoms
within large bureaucracies that
would be interesting to watch.
For instance if you began
to see policy decisions made
in governmental and in commercial
situations where they were more
and more involved with what the
machine systems are doing I think
that would support my position more
than the position that
you're putting.
Overall I think there are things
going on with technology and thought
that together whether or not
it goes the way that I'm saying
with singularity are
something new under the sun
and it's an actually very
interesting time to be alive
to track that trajectory.
>> Dr. Vinge I'm afraid
I'm going to...I'm going
to contradict you a little
bit on your point that you say
that you don't predict
the future very well.
I was reading Wire Magazine back
in July and there was an article
about the group, the internet group,
the Anonymous and specifically
about how one of the members
had been identified by the FBI
and they basically coopted him to
sort of inform on other members
of Anonymous and I thought oh,
my God this guy is Mr. Slippery,
he's Roger Pollock from True Names
and I wondered A, if you'd seen that
and B, if you could
talk a little bit
about when you envision...well were
not calling cyber space back 1981,
how much of it you think has come
to pass and how much you think is
yet to come to pass and how much
you think isn't going to happen?
>> I don't think I said it
explicitly in my story True Names
but I think that internally I
was putting it as happening it
in the year 2013 and
the in general except
that the interface device is not
like the interface device that I had
in the story, the real
interface devices we have
for the internet are different
and we don't have any evidence
of the mail man or Erythrina,
those two characters,
we don't have any evidence
in that in [inaudible] other
than that True Names
seems to be very,
very similar to what
our present situation is
and how we have gotten there.
I think one thing that pretty
much missed...I pretty much missed
in true names is the power
of big data and the power
of big surveillance
driven by big data.
I think actually this may
be one of the first places
where the singularity
actually does show
up where you get...where the
million eyeball situation,
you know right now it's fairly
easy to imagine cameras enough
to have millions of cameras
enough to have millions of cameras
in a metropolitan area,
the problem being
that we don't have
a million eyeballs
to intelligently watch
those cameras.
I think that problem is very
likely close to being solved
or already has been solved and the
result of a world where that is
in place even if the world
is a democracy is very,
is very, very interesting.
All through the 20th century
I think laws were passed
because would see something
they didn't like and say,
gee it would be nice to have a
law that that's illegal to make
that be illegal and nowadays we have
the ability to enforce every one
of the crazy laws that's
ever been passed
and I think this not surprisingly
makes people sort of uneasy and so
that was something that I didn't
have in True Names which...yeah.
>> Yeah, I guess I'm next, professor
when was the last time you programed
in this prologue 20 years
[inaudible] questions Chess
and the travelling
salesman program solved
by complete graft tree
doing all the examples.
Signal processing, landing a
carrier link for...landing a plane
on the carrier...link for
parking a car automatically,
signal processing, the eyeball
problem and manufacturing,
pattern recognition, my question
to you is your concept of AI
that you've written about in
technical journals is not the way
it's going and I don't
think it will ever go,
everybody predicted it would go that
way but it's not going that way.
We're solving the problems
on invention
that you consider AI problems
by pattern recognition,
complete graft tree and signal
processing so I don't see us getting
to the point of the AI
solutions that you wanted
or that you predict can
you answer that question?
>> Actually I don't agree with the
assertions...I do think that...I do
agree that I can make
no claim to know
or to properly predict what
things are going to go well
and what things are
not going to go well.
I think one of the most
entertaining features
of our present era is
exactly how things do go.
One analogy or metaphor that I
use is when it comes to the AI
of talking about trying to
make an artificial intelligence
that is a person, there's
certain things we can do,
there's certain things so far
we haven't been able to do,
exactly what is hard and what
is easy has been a string
of interesting surprises and in
a way some of those surprises
where there's been a lot of progress
can be met with further criticism,
oh, well this isn't what
natural human intelligence is,
valid criticisms.
Then other things turn
out to be very, very hard
and in way I regard the general
question of making a mind
that is a person is on ongoing
pursuit of humanity and it's sort
of like imagining humanity
is a sculptor whittling away
with a chisel at a block of granite
and it's trying to make a picture
of the mind and every time it does
something it takes away something
and so you get good
voice recognition
or you get a good chess player
and the response can be well that's
not really what being a person is.
So I think what we're going
to see going forward is a very
likely most exciting thing
about this era is that
going forward as we try
to do this creation we're
either going to find
that there's some things that we
can't do in which case we'll be left
with a statue that really is a
beautiful statue of the ineffable,
the irreproducible essence
of a mind or the other thing
which is what most
of the singularity people are
confident is going to happen,
more and more will be taken away
and in the end we'll be able
to do everything but we're just
going to be left with a pile
of silicon that is the sub
straight that we're running minds
on that are not organic
sub straight.
So that's the great question of what
the next few years and really one
of the most interesting questions
that I...exciting questions
that I can imagine.
>> Hi, I wanted to ask first of
all singularity is a big topic
for everybody that reads your work,
I've read a lot of...I think all
of your books um, and I one of
the ways that I've been thing
about the singularity
just to make sense
of it is asking the question how far
back could you take like...could you
take somebody from 15 years ago,
have them read the news for a week
and understand what's going on.
Or would it be 50 years ago or would
it be 10 years ago and it strikes me
that a lot of...a lot of
days the big news is stuff
that even somebody...a
random, well-informed person 10
or 15 years ago would have a hard
time facing together....wikileaks,
what...ano...what if there's
something involving computers
that makes the markets crash
unpredictably sometimes
and I just wonder if that's a good
way of looking at the singularity
that as that times gets shorter
it becomes harder to write
about the future but also even
if there's never exactly
a super human intelligence
that arises you still
have the property
that you can't talk intelligently
about something 50 years ago.
>> Right...I like to...I like
to think about putting my mind
in the position of somebody
10 years, 50 years, 100 years
and then imagine that
I'm talking to them
and how they would react...well how
they would react to here, today.
I agree that the farther you go back
the more...the slower you would have
to take it; you have to sit down
and spend an afternoon
talking to somebody.
I think Mark Twain if he came to the
National Book Festival one afternoon
if he could find sympathetic
people to talk to he'd be
up to speed, he'd love it.
On the other hand if he didn't
speak English and he was
from the Middle Ages
it would take longer.
There's another issue too
and that is you don't have
to go back very far before
they wouldn't believe you.
They understand what you're
saying but it's just baloney,
there's no way that could ever
happen...that's all...but they would
understand what you're saying.
To me the fundamental
distinction and a good reason
for calling it the
singularity, better than talking
about infinite loss,
the reason we're tlaing
about the singularity is
this unknown ability aspect,
you could explain our
era to Mark Twain
if you could talk to
him, I maintain.
You could not explain
our era to a gold fish
and that's the mental
distinction between this form
of technological progress
and prior great inventions,
like the printing press
or fire or agriculture
which were profound changes but you
could describe them to a listener
from before even if they
wouldn't believe you.
>> Are you worried
about the possibility
that some people will be able to
take advantage of the situation
of the singularity and others will
be left behind and what if I want
to go on being human but
other people want to be part
of the singularity...I
mean...is...what exact...what would
be their advantage of being
it and would I have to be one
of the computer's pets then
if I didn't want to benefit
from it...but I don't have
anything to do with it.
>> One thing about the singularity
for real is that in addition
to not...you know we can't predict
ordinary future, future when the top
of the intellectual pyramid is above
human it is even harder to predict.
I suspect that actually
it is probably the safest
and least catastrophic
outcome of the things
that could happen in the future.
My biggest fear about the future are
the moldy oldies like nuclear war,
I think that probably the
singularity is quite a good outcome
for us as humans.
In fact if it was something
that was going
to happen a hundred
thousand years from now,
I think most people...you
know you talk about,
oh good all these great
things happened,
humans striving eventually rose up
and we made something
better of our human nature.
If you look at a hundred
thousand years
from now almost everybody
would get a warm
and fuzzy feeling about
that possibility.
If you talk about something that's
going to happen before you retire
from work then or before I retire
from work then it becomes
much more nervous making
and it think that's really the
reason why it is so nervous making
as it is an extreme change, if
would only happen far enough
in the future we'd be
quite comfortable with it.
Ah, I've been given a 2
minute warning here so I think
that means probably go
for one more question.
>> Thank you, good day
thank you for speaking.
In the scenarios, the
potential scenarios you laid
out that could lead us to
the singularity, all of them
and the singularity
itself are dependent
on a technological
component, a mechanism,
a computational component, I'd
like to ask whether you
think there is the potential
for genetic enhancement or genetic
manipulation to lead us to the point
of the singularity without
artificial augmentation, thank you.
>> I think actually I gave I
think paths to the singularity
that I have two more standard paths,
one is Bio enhancement of humanity,
which I think is exactly
what you mentions,
yes I think that's a real
possibility, it is technological
but it is a real possibility and
I think actually we will see it.
That and the other
things that involve humans
like the internet plus humans,
those are very important
because those give us a wedge or
a lever into making things happen
in ways that actually benefit
biological life and ourselves kind
of going...so we're kind
of at the ground floor
of something that's super humanly
good, we're at the ground floor,
we're also in a position to make
it be super humanly good and things
like what you just described
and the internet plus people
are our chief opportunity
to make that go right.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a
presentation of the Library
of Congress, visit
us at LOC dot gov.