Here's Vinge on the subject: > 2001 V. Vinge in Locus Jan. 69/1 > In 1982, on a scientific panel, it occurred to me that with all these ideas I had been talki

Here's Vinge on the subject: > 2001 V. Vinge in Locus Jan. 69/1 > In 1982, on a scientific panel, it occurred to me that with all these ideas I had been talking about and others had been talking about earlier, basically if we ever did get a human-equivalent intelligence, very soon things would be very different. Since the creative impetus would not be from us, it would be in some sense unknowable… This panel was the first time I used the term ‘technological singularity’. I did a 900-word piece about that in ’83 in Omni, and almost all my science fiction has been dealing with it. In ’92 or ’93, NASA asked me to come and give a talk on it, and I did an essay where I also tried to look at precursors. In John von Neumann’s obituary written by Stan Ulam, he relates a conversation he had with von Neumann in which he even uses the term ‘essential singularity’. To me, von Neumann’s notion was not quite the same thing. He was saying that technological progress would become so advanced that the situation would be unknowable—that much is like what I was saying. But to me, the fundamental reason for the technological singularity is, technology creates something that is smarter than human. https://sfdictionary.com/view/294/singularity https://sfdictionary.com/view/294/singularity From Ulam's obit.: > "One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958-10189-5/S0002-9904-1958-10189-5.pdf https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958...