Vinge was one who very early recognized that the invention of artificial intelligence didn't just imply androids (as Asimov or Roddenberry imagined them) on rou

Vinge was one who very early recognized that the invention of artificial intelligence didn't just imply androids (as Asimov or Roddenberry imagined them) on roughly the level of humans, but rather the existence of a vastly superhuman species that would change the future completely. In 1983 he wrote in the SF magazine Omni: "We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible. To write a story set more than a century hence, one needs a nuclear war in between... so that the world remains intelligible." Ten years later, in is his famous essay "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" he went into more detail and predicted the singularity to occur between 2005 and 2030: https://web.archive.org/web/20180410074243/http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180410074243/http://mindstalk....