Comment by vessenes
6 hours ago
Perhaps the last great near-term predictor. I often wish he'd written more. To remind us all, he predicted shred and scan would be a short stop over done by villains on the way to nondestructive scanning.
That said, supporting Anna's archive is one of the best things you could do for humanity long term in my opinion.
Vinge also coined the term "the Singularity" (https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity) what he describes as "an opaque wall across the future" once superhuman artificial intelligence comes on the scene.
he didn't? stan ulam credits 'singularity' to von neumann
vinge wrote his singularity piece in the 80s I believe
Vinge addresses this in the linked article.
> Stan Ulam [28] paraphrased John von Neumann as saying:
>> 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.
> Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed (see [25]).)
which hews much closer to how people who are fans of the term use it (the Singularity explicitly refers to the rise of superhumanly intelligent systems, not just the progress of technology overall).
Were they the villains? I remember the rogue three-letter-agency executive being the BBEG.
I think some villainy is implied by "billionaire-backed-woodchipping of a library," but it's just my interpretation, no actual knowledge of Vinge's perspective.
Part of the (relatively) happy denouement included the Chinese coming in with the nondestructive process and everyone being quite happy with that. So yes, the Shredders were the villains.
That’s digital though, so it requires the continued survival of readers for the data that is stored. The best thing you could for the long term is probably to buy a few hundred physical books to keep in a bookcase in your home.
Speaking as someone with dozens of bookshelves and tens of thousands of books... I kind of prefer the idea that continued survival means getting a bunch of 14TB drives and, you know, hosting certain files obtained from certain places. The reality is that most people's book collections are simply going into dumpsters, speaking as one of the people who go and try to buy these book collections at estate sales. (We can't do anything with the sheer volume of these books so most of them go into the dumpster. I cannot store hundreds of thousands of books, or millions, and no libraries want them.)
Also, holy cow, hard disks (as in the magnetic oxide kind) got a lot more expensive.
Yeah agreed. I have on my long-term project list a hardware 'oracle' that would have everything and a local good model as a librarian/assistant and be solar powered in a pinch.