Vernor Vinge has died
file770.com
file770.com
This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.
(I'm glad someone linked to this. I actually bought the annotated edition a while back and was reading it back in the Palm Pilot era, I think, but I've lost it and never quite finished it. So I'm happy to see it and have no qualms for myself about grabbing it.)
There are cliff-hanger endings, or clearly unfinished works, but I don't mind a bit of uncertainty at the edge of the story.
Compare The Wheel of Time to The Lord of the Rings.
At the end of LotR, it is over. Not only is the Dark Lord defeated forever, the elves, the wizards, all magic, and our two protagonists leave the world for the Undying Lands. We're told of the lives and deaths of all the other main characters. The world is finished. There are no stories left to tell.
At the end of WoT, it's just an ending. We're told of a great cycle to the universe, but half of it remains a mystery. Our protagonists are barely into their twenties, and the world has just been turned upside down. What will happen next? Anything, everything.
I don't mind the Zones of Thought universe being left open-ended, even if I would have preferred a little more. It's the sort of universe that shouldn't be wrapped up completely.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170215121054/http://www.norwes...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170104130412/http://www.norwes...
Best aliens ever.
The third book -- while not nearly as good as either Fire Upon The Deep or Deepness in the Sky -- had even more fascinating insights into the practical mechanics of a group mind with physical bodies. Like the fact that romance happens on two separate levels!
His first book Tatja Grimm's World was also about superintelligent people (or the whole rest of the planet except them was sub-intelligent, or something… it's not clear). That one is, hmm, not nearly as good as his later ones. So I think it's just as well he didn't try.
They're giant sentient spiders living in a 50's sitcom. What's not to like?
True Names was pretty great.
> In this form, it is possible to read the story without being bothered by the comments -- yet be able to see the comments on demand. (Because of production deadlines I have not seen the exact user interface for the Clarinet edition, and so some of this discussion may be slightly inconsistent with details of the final product.)
Did the final product not hold up, or is the page not presenting it right?
wget -mkx -e robots=off https://3e.org/vvannot/>The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",[8] and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity,[4][7] in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.
Looks like he was spot on.
First known person to present the idea was mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet in the late 1700s. Not surprising, because he also laid out most ideals and values of modern liberal democracy as they are now. Amazing philosopher.
He basically invented the idea of ensemble learning (known as boosting in machine learning).
Nicolas de Condorcet and the First Intelligence Explosion Hypothesis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1609/aimag.v40i1.2855
Butlerian jihad[1] is the war against machines in the Dune universe.
"...natural [human] faculties themselves and this [human body] organisation could also be improved?"
And this was not some obscure author, but leading figure in the French Enlightenment. Thomas Malthus wrote his essay on population as counterargument.
And now I'm transforming that through the concept of taking a photograph and applying the clone tool via a light airbrush.
Repeat enough times, and you get uncompilable mud.
LLMs are not going to generate improvements.
I currently expect we'll need another architectural breakthrough; but also, back in 2009 I expected no-steering-wheel-included self driving cars no later than 2018, and that the LLM output we actually saw in 2023 would be the final problem to be solved in the path to AGI.
Prediction is hard, especially about the future.
AFAICT, both are guesses. The low-end estimate I've seen for human brains are ~ 162 GFLOPS[0] to 10^28 FLOPS[1]; even just the model size for GPT-4 isn't confirmed, merely a combination of human inference of public information with a rumour widely described as a "leak", likewise the compute requirements.
[0] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/02/17/brai...
That assumes that you can represent all of the useful parts of the decision about whether to fire or not to fire in the equivalent of one floating point operation, which seems to be an optimistic assumption. It also assumes there's no useful information encoded into e.g. phase of firing.
> Imagine that there's a little computer inside each neuron that decides when it needs to do work
Yah, there's -bajillions- of floating point operation equivalents happening in a neuron deciding what to do. They're probably not all functional.
BUT, that's why I said the "useful parts" of the decision:
It may take more than the equivalent of one floating point operation to decide whether to fire. For instance, if you are weighting multiple inputs to the neuron differently to decide whether to fire now, that would require multiple multiplications of those inputs. If you consider whether you have fired recently, that's more work too.
Neurons do all of these things, and more, and these things are known to be functional-- not mere implementation details. A computer cannot make an equivalent choice in one floating point operation.
Of course, this doesn't mean that the brain is optimal-- perhaps you can do far less work. But if we're going to use it as a model to estimate scale, we have to consider what actual equivalent work is.
There's basically a few axes you can view this on:
- Number of connections and complexity of connection structure: how much information is encoded about how to do the calculations.
- Mutability of those connections: these things are growing and changing -while doing the math on whether to fire-.
- How much calculation is really needed to do the computation encoded in the connection structure.
Basically, brains are doing a whole lot of math and working on a dense structure of information, but not very precisely because they're made out of meat. There's almost certainly different tradeoffs in how you'd build the system based on the precision, speed, energy, and storage that you have to work with.
I've also heard in a recent talk that the optic nerve carries about 20 Mbps of visual information. If we imagine a saturated task such as the famous gorilla walking through the people passing around a basketball, then we can arrive at some limits on the conscious brain. This does not count the autonomic, sympathetic, and parasympathetic processes, of course, but those could in theory be fairly low bandwidth.
There is also the matter of the "slow" computation in the brain that happens through neurotransmitter release. It is analog and complex, but with a slow clock speed.
My hunch is that the brain is fairly low FLOPs but highly specialized, closer to an FPGA than a million GPUs running an LLM.
And we don't know how many GPT-4 instances run on any single A100, or if it's the other way around and how many A100s are needed to run a single GPT-4 instance. We also don't know how many tokens/second any given instance produces, so multiple users may be (my guess is they are) queued on any given instance. We have a rough idea how many machines they have, but not how intensively they're being used.
> You can cut a brain open and see how many neurons it has and how often they fire. Kurzweil's 10 petaflops for the brain (100e9 neurons * 1000 connections * 200 calculations) is a bit high for me honestly. I don't think connections count as flops. If a neuron only fires 5-50 times a second then that'd put the human brain at .5 to 5 teraflops it seems to me.
You're double-counting. "If a neuron only fires 5-50 times a second" = maximum synapse firing rate * fraction of cells active at any given moment, and the 200 is what you get from assuming it could go at 1000/second (they can) but only 20% are active at any given moment (a bit on the high side, but not by much).
Total = neurons * synapses/neuron * maximum synapse firing rate * fraction of cells active at any given moment * operations per synapse firing
1e11 * 1e3 * 1e3 Hz * 10% (of your brain in use at any given moment, where the similarly phrased misconception comes from) * 1 floating point operation = 1e16/second = 10 PFLOP
It currently looks like we need more than 1 floating point operation to simulate a synapse firing.
> The other estimates like 1e28 are measuring different things.
Things which may turn out to be important for e.g. Hebbian learning. We don't know what we don't know. Our brains are much more sample-efficient than our ANNs.
Firstly, Kurzweil underestimates the number connections by order of magnitude.
Secondly, dentritic computation changes things. Individual dentrites and the dendritic tree as a whole can do multiple individual computations. logical operations low-pass filtering, coincidence detection, ... One neuronal activation is potentially thousands of operations per neuron.
Single human neuron can be equivalent of thousands of ANN's.
As long as the bottleneck is the fab capacity as wafers per hous, the number of operations per second per chip area determines who will produce more compute with best price. It's a good measure even between different technology nodes and superchips.
Nvidia is leader for a reason.
If manufacturing capacity increases to match the demand in the future, FLOPS or TOPS per Watt may become relevant, but now it's fab capacity.
I know they can provide creative new solutions to totally novel problems from firsthand experience… instead of assuming what they should be able to do, I experimented to see what they can actually do.
Focusing on the simple mechanics of training and prediction is to miss the forest for the trees. It’s as absurd as saying how can living things have any intelligence? They’re just bags of chemicals oxidizing carbon. True but irrelevant- it misses the deeper fact that solving almost any problem deeply requires understanding and modeling all of the connected problems, and so on, until you’ve pretty much encompassed everything.
Ultimately it doesn’t even matter what problem you’re training for- all predictive systems will converge on general intelligence as you keep improving predictive accuracy.
Until we get to a point where an AI has the wherewithal to create a fab to make its own chips and then do assembly w/o human intervention (something along the lines of Steve Jobs vision of a computer factory where sand goes in at one end and finished product rolls out the other) it doesn't seem likely to amount to much.
An LLM is not going to suggest a reasonable improvement to itself, except by sheerest luck.
But then next generation, where the LLM is just the language comprehension and generation model that feeds into something else yet to be invented, I have no guarantees about whether that will be able to improve itself. Depends on what it is.
It would be left to human researchers to investigate them and find out if any work. If they succeed, the LLM will get all the credit for the idea, if they fail, it's them who will have wasted their time.
Blackwell.
> o Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I'm suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [22] has done wonderful work in this direction.
Stable Diffusion.
> o Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on it.)
iPhone and Android.
> o Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance.
Cicero.
> Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
Trump.
> o Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more effective than their component members). This is generally the area of "groupware", already a very popular commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from ego issues such that the contribution of different members is focussed on the team project. And of course shared data bases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team operations rather than political meetings. In a political setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the power of the persons making the rules!)
Ingress.
> o Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren't for the edge that the USENET "group mind" gives the system administration and support people!) The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis' [14] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).
Twitter.
> o Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [13]. This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct communcation.
Atom Limbs.
> o Similar direct links into brains may be feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.
Neuralink.
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> Blackwell.
I'm fucking sorry but there is no LLM or "AI" platform that is even real intelligence, today, easily demonstrated by the fact that an LLM cannot be used to create a better LLM. Go on, ask ChatGPT to output a novel model that performs better than any other model. Oh, it doesn't work? That's because IT'S NOT INTELLIGENT. And it's DEFINITELY not "superhuman intelligence." Not even close.
Sometimes accurately regurgitating facts is NOT intelligence. God it's so depressing to see commenters on this hell-site listing current-day tech as ANYTHING approaching AGI.
I don't know where that "computationally sufficient" line is. It'll always be fuzzy (because you could have a very slow, but smart entity). And before we have a working AGI, thinking about how much computation we need always comes down to back of the envelope estimations with radically different assumptions of how much computational work brains do.
But I can't rule out the idea that current architectures have enough processing to do it.
If a human brain does its magic with 10 petaflops, and you have 1 petaflop, you should be able to make an equivalent to the human brain that runs at 1/10th of the speed but never sleeps. In other words, once you've reached the same order of magnitude it doesn't matter.
On the other hand, Kurzweil's math really comes down to an argument that the brain is using about 10 petaflops for inference, but it also is changing weights and doing a lot more math and optimization for training (which we don't completely understand). It may (or may not) take considerably more than 10 petaflops to train at the rate humans learn. And remember, humans take years to do anything useful.
Further, 10 petaflops may be enough math, but it doesn't mean you can store enough information or flow enough state between the different parts "of the model."
These are the big questions. If we knew the answers, IMO, we would already have really slow AGI.
Ok, let's run this test of "real intelligence" on you. We eagerly await to see your model. Should be a piece of cake.
By that logic most humans are also not intelligent.
LLMs are a game changer that are going to enable a new programming paradigm as models get faster and better at producing structured output. There are entire classes of app that couldn't exist before because there there was a non-trivial "fuzzy" language problem in the loop. Furthermore I don't think people have a conception of how good these models are going to get within 5-10 years.
Pretty sure it's quite the opposite of what you're implying: People see those LLMs who closely resemble actual intelligence on the surface, but have some shortcomings. Now they extrapolate this and think it's just a small step to perfection and/or AGI, which is completely wrong.
One problem is that converging to an ideal is obviously non-linear, so getting the first 90% right is relatively easy, and closer to 100% it gets exponentially harder. Another problem is that LLMs are not really designed in a way to contain actual intelligence in the way humans would expect them to, so any apparent reasoning is very superficial as it's just language-based and statistical.
In a similar spirit, science fiction stories playing in the near future often tend to have spectacular technology, like flying personal cars, in-eye displays, beam travel, or mind reading devices. In the 1960s it was predicted for the 80s, in the 80s it was predicted for the 2000s etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-W-Livingston/dp/0...
tells (among other things) a harrowing tale of a common mistake in technology development that blindsides people every time: the project that reaches an asymptote instead of completion that can get you to keep spending resources and spending resources because you think you have only 5% to go except the approach you've chosen means you'll never get the last 4%. It's a seductive situation that tends to turn the team away from Cassandras who have a clear view.
Happens a lot in machine learning projects where you don’t have the right features. (Right now I am chewing on the problem of “what kind of shoes is the person in this picture wearing?” and how many image classification models would not at all get that they are supposed to look at a small part of the image and how easy it would be to conclude that “this person is on a basketball court so they are wearing sneakers” or “this is a dude so they aren’t wearing heels” or “this lady has a fancy updo and fancy makeup so she must be wearing fancy shoes”. Trouble is all those biases make the model perform better up to a point but to get past that point you really need to segment out the person’s feet.)
Of course it doesn't help that people are a bit hand wavy about what that mark exactly is to begin with. We're very good at moving the goal posts. So that 100% mark has the problem that it's poorly defined and in any case just a brief moment in time given exponential improvements in capabilities. In the eyes of most we're not quite there yet for whatever there is. I would agree with that.
At some point we'll be debating whether we are actually there, and then things move on from there. A lot of that debate is going to be a bit emotional and irrational of course. People are very sensitive about these things and they get a bit defensive when you portray them as clearly inferior to something else. Arguably, most people I deal with don't actually know a lot, their reasoning is primitive/irrational, and if you'd benchmark them against an LLM it wouldn't be that great. Or that fair.
The singularity is kind of the point where most of the improvements to AI are going to come from ideas and suggestions generated by AI rather than by humans. Whether that's this decade or the next is a bit hard to predict obviously.
Human brains are quite complicated but there's only a finite number of neurons in there; a bit under 100 billion. We can waffle a bit about the complexity of their connections. But at some point it becomes a simple matter of throwing more hardware at the problem. With LLMs pushing tens-hundreds of parameters already, you could legitimately ask what a few more doublings in numbers here enable.
Insofar as it's simple to throw like six orders of magnitude more hardware at something that has already had a lot of hardware thrown at it.
o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users
may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
o Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural
human intellect.
I don't believe LLMs will really get us much of anywhere, Singularity-wise. They're just ridiculously inefficient in terms of compute (and thus power) needs to even do the basic pattern-prediction they do today. They're neat tools for human augmentation in some cases, but that's about all they contribute.
I think, even prior to the recent explosion of LLM stuff, that the aggregate of Humans and the depth of their interconnections on the Internet is already starting to form at least the beginnings of a sort of Singularity, without any AI-related topics needing to be introduced. The way memes (real memes, not silly jokes) spread around the Internet and shape thoughts across all the users, the way the users bounce ideas off each other and refine them, the way viral advocacy and information sharing works, etc. Basically the Singularity is just going to be the emergent group consciousness and capabilities of the collective Internet-connected set of Humans.
It was more the second derivative of future shock: technologies and culture that enabled and encouraged faster and faster change until the curve bent essentially vertical…asymptotimg to a mathematical singularity.
An example my he spoke of was that, close to the singularity, someone might found a corporation, develop a technology, make a profit from it, and then have it be obsolete by noon.
And because you can’t see the shape of the curve on the other side of such a singularity, people living on the other side of it would be incomprehensible to people on this side.
Ray Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” explored this phenomenon years before Toffler wrote “Future Shock”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime
where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is one of the best pretenses ever in sci-fi. (I am left wondering though if the best cultural comparison is "The Rapture" some Christians believe in making this more of a religiously motivated concept as opposed to sound futurism.)
I've long been fascinated by this differential equation
dx
-- = x^2
dt
x = 1/(t₀-t)
https://agi-conf.org/2010/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/agi10si...
seem to miss it. (Surprised the lesswrong folks haven't picked it up but they don't seem too mathematically inclined)
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Note I don't believe in the intelligence explosion because what we've seen in "Moore's law" recently is that each generation of chips is getting much more difficult and expensive to develop whereas the benefits of shrinks are shrinking and in fact we might be rudely surprised that the state of the art chips of the new future (and possibly 2024) burn up pretty quickly. It's not so clear that chipmakers would have continued to invest in a new generation if governments weren't piling huge money into a "great powers" competition... That is, already we might be past the point of economic returns.
For one thing dense vectors for language seem kinda insane to me. Change one pixel in a picture and it makes no difference to the meaning. Change one letter in a sentence and you can change the meaning completely so a continuous representation seems fundamentally wrong.
On a second read, when I knew where the story was going and didn't need the frisson of resolution, I enjoyed it much more. It's good B & C plot, and it all does tie in. But arguably the pacing is off.
I later read the prequel and did not like it. I never read the third book in the trilogy.
The bobble is a speculative technology that originated in Vernor Vinge's science fiction. It allows spherical volumes to be enclosed in complete stasis for controllable periods of time. It was used in _The Peace War_ as a weapon, and in _Marooned in Realtime_ as a way for humans to tunnel through the Singularity unchanged.
As far as I know, the bobble is physically impossible. However it may be possible to simulate its effects with other technologies. Here I am especially interested in the possibility of tunneling through the Singularity.
Why would anyone want to do that, you ask? Some people may have long term goals that might be disrupted by the Singularity, for example maintaining Danny Hillis's clock or keeping a record of humanity. Others may want to do it if the Singularity is approaching in an unacceptable manner and they are powerless to stop or alter it. For example an anarchist may want to escape a Singularity that is dominated by a single consciousness. A pacifist may want to escape a Singularity that is highly adversarial. Perhaps just the possibility of tunneling through the Singularity can ease people's fears about advanced technology in general.
Singularity tunneling seems to require a technology that can defend its comparatively powerless users against extremely, perhaps even unimaginably, powerful adversaries. The bobble of course is one such technology, but it is not practical. The only realistic technology that I am aware of that is even close to meeting this requirement is cryptography. In particular, given some complexity theoretic assumptions it is possible to achieve exponential security in certain restricted security models. Unfortunately these security models are not suitable for my purpose. While adversaries are allowed to have computational power that is exponential in the amount of computational power of the users, they can only interact with the users in very restricted ways, such as reading or modifying the messages they send to each other. It is unclear how to use cryptography to protect the users themselves instead of just their messages. Perhaps some sort of encrypted computation can hide their thought processes and internal states from passive monitors. But how does one protect against active physical attacks?
The reason I bring up cryptography, however, is to show that it IS possible to defend against adversaries with enormous resources at comparatively little cost, at least in certain situations. The Singularity tunneling problem should not be dismissed out of hand as being unsolvable, but rather deserves to be studied seriously. There is a very realistic chance that the Singularity may turn out to be undesirable to many of us. Perhaps it will be unstable and destroy all closely-coupled intelligence. Or maybe the only entity that emerges from it will have the "personality" of the Blight. It is important to be able to try again if the first Singularity turns out badly.
and: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jgz/aalwa_ask_any_lesswronger_anythi...
"I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net. And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim May who besides inspiring me with his vision of cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early retirement from the tech industry and working on his own interests/causes."
Being surprised is also an exciting outcome. Was he thinking about that too?
I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wrote. A Deepness in the Sky is a worthy sequel.
He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy exposition, but by expert omission.
A true name in sci-fi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
THE cyberpunk book.
Also, his later books are great but the "Across Realtime" trilogy has a special place in my heart. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/167844
That novella is basically an illustrated warning of misaligned super intelligence (it’s also really good!)
Also stuck on book 8 of the Wheel of Time series, I was like 5 chapters in and didn't pick up a single thread I cared about from the previous book.
Agree about the expert omission part.
Wheel of Time, on the other hand, I was very glad to give up on right around the same point as you.
Many times I've considered re-cutting the books/audio-books for WoT to remove what I find to a be drudgery but it would be a massive task that I'm not up to. I just skip over the parts in my re-reads of the series.
I'll be the first to say that WoT has /many/ flaws but it will forever hold a special place in my heart. You just have to get past the way women are written in the series (and I understand if you can't). That's something else I'd be happy to prune out or ideally fix but that's well beyond my skill set. Elaine and Egwene especially are horribly written in the last few books (and it's not all Brandon Sanderson's fault I assume, they aren't great in the prior books either).
About once a season I contemplate the idea of approaching either Sanderson or the Jordan estate and ask that they consider an abridged edition edited by Sanderson. You could easily knock 1500 pages out of this series and not change a single thing.
Meanwhile Rosamund Pike is doing new audio books for the series and the samples sound much better than the old one. But the first one is about forty hours. As much as I might like to claim that I would listen to her read a phone book, I don’t think I can listen to 600 hours of audiobooks for one series.
In the paperbacks, each chapter with the “bad guys” had a special symbol on it, so I just skipped through the middle books reading only those. Fortunately the Dark One was still trying to progress the plot, and I don’t think I missed much.
No one wanted more Game of Dogs.
But it turned out that I didn't want that much more.
Except half of Fire Upon the Deep was characters on the same planet but it was actually cool. The first two books are definitely among my favorite sci-fi of all time, the third one was a dud.
My main gripe is that these three books all share the same trope that underpins one of the major subplots: glib, charming politician type is scheming, eeeeevil. In the first two books, there's enough novelty (how the Tines and Spiders work, programming as archaeology, localizer mania) to make up for that. But I don't really think the third book adds much in the same way, and it is also very clearly building to a confrontation that will happen in a future book. So the staleness is much more noticeable
I wish I could find something else like VV's work that's sort of under-the-radar. I do have to mention that things like The Three Body Problem get hype, but are several tiers below VVs work.
Incidentally, Brin and Benford along with Greg Bear, are collectively known as the "Killer Bs". Practically everything written by any of the three is likely to be a great read.
I can't really judge Asimov - so many people stole from him that he just reads like War & Peace to me in the sense that it was probably awesome and novel at some point, but at this point it's just a little stale, even though Foundation was still cool...at least the first few books.
With that said, I don't put VV above Stephenson. Maybe above Gibson because I really appreciate the technical details, but not quite sure. To me VV, Stephenson, and Gibson are all the absolute top tier, at least in the sci fi realm. No one even comes close, as cool as some one offs by other authors, like Forever War, are.
It's like he had the idea for the dystopia, with the main character fighting against the machines. And then tried to write a story around it. The central idea is interesting I guess, but the story built around it is not.
It doesn't help that the fight is futile, the machines as described are so powerful humanity doesn't stand a chance, so what kind of story can you make?
Maybe the later books are better.
Unfortunately every single one of his books has this problem. It's like all of his novels are written from the perspective of the protagonist's housecat.
True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote.
Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer).
RIP
Rainbow's End was very good!
Two separate novels: 'The Peace War' and 'Marooned in Realtime', sold collectively as 'Across Realtime'. Enjoyed them both a lot, but for me 'Marooned...' had a more emotional punch, especially as it becomes clearer what had happened to the victim.
There is also a short story 'The Ungoverned' whose main character is Wil W. Brierson, the protagonist in 'Marooned...'.
Overviews without plot spoilers: 'The Peace War' describes a near-future in which bobbles (apparently indestructible stasis fields where time stands still) are used by 'hacker' types to launch an insurrection against the state. 'Marooned...' is set in the far future of the same world, where bobbles are used to support one-way time travel further into the future, where the few remaining humans try to reconnect following the mysterious disappearance of 99.9% of humanity. Both are high-concept SF, but 'Marooned...' also has elements of police procedural where a low-tech detective (Brierson) shanghaied into his future has to solve the slow murder of a high-tech individual (someone from the far future, relative to him).
Edit: I got it backwards, Egan's book came out first.
I also credit the Transcend as being the first plausible, secular explanation for "gods" that I ever came across back in my militant atheist days.
These stories will be with me until I am gone, too. Thank you, Vernor. RIP.
Additionally I think he was the first sci Fi author I found who was a computer science practitioner/professor. This led me to discover other great authors like Greg Egan.
He taught me how to implement OS thread context switching in 68000 assembly language. We also had a lab where we had to come up with a simple assembly function that executed slow or fast depending on whether it used the cache efficiently or not.
Great teacher and author, and a very nice guy in general.
Also, raping and torturing are very "evil for the sake of evil", if you ask me.
IIRC wasn't it the chamber/ship of someone he worked with, that he tolerated? Read it like six or seven years ago, so the details are fuzzy. The impression I kept was that he did a lot of evil stuff not because he relished the suffering he created in others, but because he didn't mind it.
But there's also a record of him personally torturing and raping one of the captives for the sake of it - which he keeps around, presumably to rewatch every now and then.
Anyway I think the point remains - after that point, the reader is meant to understand that the emergents self-serving justifications are just that.
The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil, and there's never any indication given that they actually care about those terrible prices, or even reflect on them for long. Vinge is very good at channeling the Orwellian language that regimes like these use, but I didn't find his intent at all ambiguous.
The really compelling and ambiguous character in that book is [redacted spoiler], who really does grapple with the moral implications of his decisions, but ultimately chooses the not-evil path. Personally I think this also highlight's Vinge's biggest flaw as an author for me, which is that in all of his books, the most fully realized and believable protagonist is a scheming megalomaniac, with second place going to the abusive misanthrope of Rainbows End, and third to the prickly settlement leader in Marooned in Realtime. All of the more sympathetic characters feel like empty vessels that just react to the plot.
While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwhelmed within the first paragraph of the first page). Highly entertaining and interesting.
I wonder what Vinge thought of LLMs. If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today.
A huge loss indeed.
I mean, I don't think LLMs have been notably useful in decoding unknown languages, have they?
In the book the characters had access to effectively unbounded input since it was a live civilization generating the data, plus they had reference to at least some video, and... something else that would be very useful for decoding language but would constitute probably a medium-grade spoiler if I shared, so there's another relevant difference.
Still, it should also be said it wasn't literally LLMs, it was humans, merely, "affected" in a way that they are basically all idiot savants on the particular topic of language acquisition.
(That said it would be an interesting _experiment_, if a little hard to set up; you'd need a live language which hadn't made it into the LLM's training set at all, so you'd probably need to purpose-train an LLM...)
Could you elaborate on this? It's been a while since I read the novel. I remember the use of Focus to create obsessive problem-solvers, but not sure how it relates to generative models or LLMs.
Thinking about it, I'm not sure how useful LLMs can be for translating entirely new languages. As I understand it they rely on statistical correlations harvested from training data which would not include any existing translations by definition.
I may be misremembering certain details, but the similarity to neural networks and their use in machine translation was quite apparent.
It’s that hyper-focus that I suspect many of us have experienced, but without agency and permanent. Worse than slavery.
R.I.P. dear friend, you will be missed and remembered.
I casually browsed every shelf, enamoured with the collection of scifi .. until I got to what I can only describe as a Golden Book Shrine Ensconced in Halo of Respect - a carefully maintained, diligently laid out bookshelf containing every single thing Vernor Vinge had written. Everything, the friend said, including stuff that Vernor had shared with him that would never see the light of day until after he passed away. I wonder about that guy now.
It wasn't my first intro to Mr. Vinge, but it was my first intro to the fanaticism and devotion of his fan base - that in itself, was a unique phenomenon to observe. Almost religious.
Which, given Mr. Vinge's works, is awe-inspiring, ironic and tragic at the same time.
For me, it was a singular experience, realizing that science fiction literature as a genre was far more vital and important to our culture than it was granted in the mainstream. (This was the mid-90's)
Science Fiction authors are capable of inculcating much inspiration and wonder in their fans yet "scifi" is often used in a derogatory way among the literature cognescenti. Alas, this myopia occludes a great value to society, and I thank Mr. Vinge - and his fanboix - for bringing me to a place where I understood it was okay to value science fiction as a motivational form. That Golden Book Shrine Ensconced in Halo was itself a gateway to much wonder and awe.
For me the distinction is in the nature of speculation. If you speculate about some facet, and it seems feasible but fantastic, this is the event horizon at which the subject becomes useful as well as entertaining. It was no doubt of great utility to the original developers of satellites to have had Arthur C. Clarkes' models in their minds.
However, its hardly viable to speculate about regular use of teleportation or faster than light travel .. unless, of course, we end up getting these things because some kid read a story and decided it could be done, in spite of the rest of the worlds feeling about it ..
A few examples: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fantastic Voyage, Moon, much of Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, Prospect, etc.
And for that matter there is plenty of SciFi in print as well, and it isn't all novelizations of movies and TV shows.
There is certainly more room for exposition in a novel (a fact which plenty of authors have abused over the decades, and plenty of directors have abdicated responsibility for by tacking on lengthy voiceover or on-screen text introductions), which often allows for more complete worldbuilding to explore whatever contrafactual premise the story is built around, but it is possible on-screen as well, as long as you don't rely solely on the dialog to convey it. For that matter, books shouldn't rely solely on the dialog for that purpose either.
Of course, on-screen dramatic works aren't the only ones that face the problem of conveying a setting in few words. Novellas, novelettes, and short stories have similar constraints to various degrees.
You can think of the apparent survival of Rabbit as a hint of doom right at the end, like the fact R's diary is in the slush pile at the end of the Watchmen comic book.
I'm fairly certain the mysterious event in Marooned in Realtime was Ascension.
For Fire Upon Deep, it was sealed and there was a powerful countermeasure.
The rabbit of Rainbows End felt like a trickster to me. Child-like playfulness, fey-like chaotic neutral at worst. I do not interpret Rabbit's survival as hints of doom. The weapon was plain old human abuse of power for control.
It doesn't matter that Rabbit doesn't intend harm. Neither does Tatja, at least to those who aren't trying to harm her. But well, look at what she does, at first she almost gets a few dozen people killed, reckless teenager but hardly extraordinary, next time we see her she's about to tear apart a kingdom to fraudulently seize power, and as collateral she's (without telling them) ensured everybody she knew previously will die if she fails. By the end Tatja has started a war in order to seize control of a means to signal off world. Only two other people on her world even realises what "signalling off world" would even mean, but she's potentially going to kill huge numbers of people to achieve it anyway. She's a catastrophe even though that wasn't her intent. She does apologise, for whatever it's worth, right at the very end, to people who were close to her and from whom she belatedly realises she is now so distant.
Rabbit is indeed just playing. When the library nearly falls over and kills a lot of university staff and students, that's just a small taste of what happens when playful Rabbit forgets for a moment that this isn't really just a game. Consider just how powerful Rabbit is remembering that's a distraction. The whole fight, which causes massive disruption to the city and easily could have led to enormous loss of life, isn't what Rabbit was really doing, it was just to distract Bob's team so that they don't focus on the labs for a few hours. And remember that Rabbit's goal here is clearly to secure the weapon for itself, not to deny it to the antagonist.
I suspect very strongly that had we gotten a followup or two, it would have turned out that the Rabbit had been around for a very long time before even the first transistor.
Too much science fiction nowadays is dystopian, cynical and pessimistic. I don’t have a problem with any individuals writing stuff like that if they really want to. People should have the freedom to write whatever they want. I just personally feel like there is too much of the cynical pessimistic stuff being written nowadays.
So seeing that Vernor Vinge wrote stores that portray science and humanity in positive hopeful and optimistic ways makes me very interested in reading his work.
* A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.
The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
* In said future human society pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>
(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)
Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns - although not at FaceTwitTok scale.
But still, I love Vinge's take on information entropy across time, space and social networks. A Deepness in the Sky features the profession of programmer–archaeologist and I'm here for that !
I still remember the moment when I realised that the galactic network in 'Fire...' was in fact based on Usenet (which I used heavily at the time), especially how it was low bandwidth text (given the interstellar distances) and how it had a fair number of nutters posting nonsense across the galaxy ('the key insight is hexapodia'). Great author, who'll be sadly missed.
I would’ve loved to read his reaction to the 2020s. Rainbow’s End is by far the best prediction of what this decade has been like, from 30 years ahead.
I wish we’d gotten to read a few more books from Vinge.
The cookie monster is, IMO, a thought-provoking marvel.
That’s the gamble. I think you’re right though, it’s far lower odds than the snake oil salesmen present.
https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/21/cryogenic-organ-preserva...
Cryopreservation of corpses is a scam designed to fleece rich people with an extraordinary fear of death. Some justify it to themselves as supporting research which might lead to effective corpsicles, but to support such research they could simply donate to it. Not waste their money on an elaborate and expensive embalming with no hope of salvation.
I don't understand this kind of pessimism at all.
You are saying that existing technology is unable to fix the issues of vitrification. That is correct, but irrelevant.
Expensive coffins, elaborate headstones, burial plot sales, etc.
As soon as somebody tries to spend their money in a way that might actually benefit them, people get defensive or try to justify death as noble or natural.
¹: https://www.alcor.org/news/ ²: https://cryonics.org/case-reports/
If Vernor Vinge doesn't deserve the black banner atop HN, then nobody does.
I still maintain that Miyazaki needs to adapt RE before he heads out himself: https://imgur.com/a/8PeXHlb
He taught classes that going through the actual 68000 assembly to perform the context switch between threads in an interrupt service routine (copy the saved registers from the running thread on the stack to a separate area, and overwrite them on the stack with the registers from the thread you want to switch to).
To truly understand the transformative potential of something like a VR headset if technology allowed it to be unobtrusive and omnipresent, one must read Vinge. The idea of consensual reality as portrayed in, e.g., Fast Times at Fairmont High, is kind of mind-blowing.
Currently reading The children of the sky. And wow I had somewhat forgotten how good sci-fi can be. So much depth, such coherent and well thought out worlds.
Thinking about this too, I'm sure he did a great job as a professor, supporting his family and teaching. But in addition, he had this greater creative gift to reach millions, too! I think this pattern probably applies to a lot of us. Working and doing useful things during the day out of necessity... and like him, I hope everyone on HN puts in the effort and time to do something creative, too, and finds their audience. It'd have been a shame of the creative side of Vinge had never gotten out!
A sensational adventure story, with the particular science-fiction skill of communicating strangeness, effortlessly.
"Zones of Thought" was a really smart idea once you got it. I put him as 2nd generation genius like "Hendrix -> Van Halen": "Asimov -> Vinge". Also (only real nitpick ever), like Asimov, was a little weak in dialogue and the poetry of words (comparing to Tolkein and Heinlein), but they were literally both STEM "Dr.s/PhD's".
Rainbow's End seemed to be the FAANG playbook for many years: drones, AR (google glass on), haptics, autonomous automobiles, and on and on. Was thinking literally yesterday about how the biotech and architecture/earthquake ideas hadn't made it to today (which is around when the story takes place), but the latency issues seem to have been licked well before now.
Requiescat in Pace
Across Real Time is also great and shorter.
If you're looking for something more germane to present concerns, Rainbows End is about a near future where people's interaction with the world is mediated by augmented reality and various forces are fighting over access to information.
And since I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, Marooned In Realtime is also really good.
But if you're looking for a single book, then you won't go wrong with A Fire Upon The Deep.
And +1 for Marooned in Realtime. The awesome scale reminds me of Greg Egan, but it highlights Vinge's particular genius for imagining side-effects of the technological premise.
I loved A Fire Upon the Deep. It gave me many hours of pleasure and many things to think about.
> then have to close it and never know the end
That bit has irked me to no end since I was young!
I'm sorry he's died.
Rainbows End has a special place in my heart. As a teen a buddy and I used to explore the UCSD tunnels and labs at night and let our imaginations run wild about what we’d see.
Does this mean something other than a wu tang fan?
Also there was some media noise about killer bees, and they became part of the standard dungeon zoo, I think. Plus, possibly just "the Bees" would prompt "What, the Bee Gees?", a terrible risk.
I love the cyberpunk vibe of "Prisoners of Gravity" (1992) but it only discusses "Marooned in Realtime"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERRA8qXvuyU&t=87s