Vernor Vinge is best known for predicting the singularity in 30 years in 1993. He wrote that he would be surprised if it happened before 2005 or after 2030. 2023 was right after the release of ChatGPT when LLMs passed the Turing test.
Of course there was no singularity because there was no point in time when machines surpassed human intelligence, supposedly the threshold of accelerating recursive self improvement. RSI started centuries ago when companies reinvested their profits to grow exponentially. The economy started growing faster than population about 1800, ending Malthusian limits on population growth. Depending on how you measure intelligence, computers surpassed humans in the 1950s in speed and short term memory. LLMs today have the knowledge of 10,000 people, are fluent in 200 languages, are Ph.D. level experts in every field of science, law, and medicine, and can write and debug code hundreds of times faster than humans. But even that hasn't put a dent in the unemployment rate. It won't, of course. Technology makes us richer by making humans more productive with less effort and more pay. It makes stuff cheaper, so you have more left over to spend, which creates more jobs. The global economy is booming, even in the US as it temporarily isolates itself with trade barriers and falls behind China. The long term trend is toward a world without war, borders, prisons, or poverty. But that's not a singularity. Sigmoids start as exponentials until they reach a resource limit. The universe has finite computing capacity, although it is far beyond one that needs humans. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:24 PM Paul Cray <[email protected]> wrote: > I recall some similar scheme in Vernor Vinge's 'Rainbows End': > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End_(Vinge_novel). > > Paul > > On Thu, 30 Jul 2026 at 19:23, Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> AI companies are buying millions of old books, scanning them, and >> shredding them. They cannot sell or give away the books after training >> because it would violate copyright laws. It is easier to buy the book than >> buy the rights to it. >> >> https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/s/Fe7r71Afrx >> >> >> -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] >> > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T4caf9b5a87dcf0ba-M7ef98e9232123193e6d0ff69> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T4caf9b5a87dcf0ba-M8a53a6cc5ad2ce252c28ba2c Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
