[extropy-chat] Vernor Vinge sighting

[Johnius]

Hi all,

  Vernor Vinge gave a 1 hour lecture last weekend at the
San Diego Mensa Regional Gathering.  The talk was a fairly
standard one based on Moore's Law, covering various future
scenarios:

1. Technology increases to the point of self-destruction,
  whereupon we return to the stone age (assuming we survive),
  either to stay there or to repeat the cycle.

2. Technology reaches a natural (or legally imposed) hardware
  limit, so future advancements can only be made in software
  (giving us the opportunity to perform software archeology,
  and to redesign code to finally get it right, etc.)

3. Technology increases without limit, with the watershed 
  event of AI devices becoming more intelligent than us ...
  in which case we can only guess at what they'll do.

  These topics have all been covered before, here and elsewhere,
in great depth, while his talk was geared for intelligent 
laypeople, so the above summary will suffice.

  During the Questions/Answers portion, I had to ask him about
a scenario he left out:

4. Humans use the superior technology to enhance themselves, 
  thus joining the Cybernetic Revolution themselves.

  Vinge surprised me with what seemed to be a rather pessimistic
answer.  He said I was talking about IA (intelligence amplification),
rather than AI, and that different people would be enhanced in 
different ways, making us unequal, with devastating consequences
in a competitive environment ... we wouldn't be able to trust anyone
but ourselves (I suppose "every man for himself").  Unless I 
misunderstood him, I think this is what he was projecting. 

  Needless to say, I felt rather unsatisfied with his answer.
He seemed casually to dismiss the entire idea of transhumanism,
and to desire relative human egalitarianism.  
  One audience member commented that perhaps the superior AIs
would take us on as pets to be well-cared for.  It seemed to me
that Vinge liked or at least was amused by the idea...

FWIW, John McP