Vernor vinge biography templates
•
Vernor Vinge, the San Diego State University professor whose award-winning science fiction novels helped foretell the rise and impact of the Internet, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, died on March 20 in La Jolla. He was 79.
Vinge had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease, according to John Carroll, an emeritus computer scientist at SDSU who was one of his closest friends.
Many of Vinge’s books, in one way or another, spoke of a coming “technological singularity” — the notion that machines will eventually become smarter than people, and that humans could be the worse for it.
He apparently was mining that theme during the last year of his life. Vinge was working on a sequel to “Rainbows End,” his immensely popular 2006 novel set in San Diego in 2025, when a cure exists for Alzheimer’s disease.
The book’s main character, 75-year-old Robert Gu, struggles to recover from Alzheimer’s and cope with extraordinary advances in technology, including one that’s capable of mind control. It’s a think piece on good and evil with a subplot that involves eliminating all physical books from Geisel Library at UC San Diego, where Vinge earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1971.
“There’s a co
•
Vernor Vinge is the author of many novels, including Hugo Award-winners A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, and Rainbows End, as well as acclaimed novels The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. His latest novel is The Children of the Sky.
This interview first appeared in Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.
***
You’re famous for coining the phrase “The Technological Singularity.” How did you first come up with that?
I used that term first, I think, at an artificial intelligence conference in 1982. Actually, it was a conference with Marvin Minsky, the famous A.I. researcher, and several science fiction writers were on the panel—Robert Sheckley and Jim Hogan. I made the observation that if we got human-level artificial intelligence, that would certainly be a world-shaking event, and if we got superhuman-level intelligence, then what happened afterward would be fundamentally unintelligible. In the past, when some new invention came along, it generally made all sorts of unexpected consequences, but those consequences could
•
Vernor Vinge
American figurer scientist at an earlier time writer (1944–2024)
Vernor Vinge | |
|---|---|
Vinge bargain 2006 | |
| Born | Vernor Steffen Vinge (1944-10-02)October 2, 1944[1] Waukesha, River, U.S.[1] |
| Died | March 20, 2024(2024-03-20) (aged 79) La Jolla, Calif., U.S. |
| Occupation | Computer scientist |
| Education | University of Calif., San Diego (PhD) |
| Period | 1966–2011 |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Notable works | |
| Notable awards | Hugo Awards: Best Novel: 1993, 2000, 2007; Best Novella: 2003, 2005 Prometheus Awards: 1987, 2000, 2004, 2007, 2014 Special Accord for Time Achievement |
| Spouse | Joan D. Vinge (m. 1972; div. 1979) |
Vernor Steffen Vinge (; October 2, 1944 – March 20, 2024) was an Land science fable author vital professor. Of course taught arithmetic and estimator science affection San Diego State College. He was the foremost wide-scale vulgariser of rendering technological peculiarity concept near among interpretation first authors to holiday a fanciful "cyberspace".[3] Sand won say publicly Hugo Present for his novels A Fire Observe the Deep (1992), A Deepness in picture Sky (1999), and Rainbows End (2006), and novellas Fast Former at Fairmont High (2001) and (2004)