>>Male Presenter: My name's Brad Templeton.
I'm director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And also professor at the new Singularity
University that Google co-founded which is
just down the street at NASA.
And that word "singularity" is a word you’re
gonna hear a little bit in this talk.
But I'm also working at Google X right now.
And I've been wanting for some time to invite
up Vernor Vinge to come and speak to Google.
Now, Vernor as hopefully many of you know
is really one of the most decorated science
fiction authors of our time.
I'm gonna make you blush.
And say I would suggest you are the greatest
computer related science fiction writer that
there is alive today.
He has won five Hugo awards.
Three of them in a row for Best Novel.
And I think the only person who's won three
in a row for Best Novel is Lois Bujold
>>Vernor Vinge: hmmm.
>>Male Presenter: I think that's the other
person who's done that.
So it's a very rare distinction.
Five Hugo awards is a rare distinction.
And hers were for three in the same series.
You had two different series in the three
awards you won in a row.
Vernor is also the creator of, or coiner at
least of the term, "the singularity" to refer
to an incredible explosion of intelligence
and exponential technology changing the world.
And the difficulty of predicting beyond it.
That has become an entire movement.
Including the Singularity University that
I just referred to.
He was also, until recently, a professor of
computer science at San Diego State University.
So he's not just a writer.
[chuckles] And so he's got a real career.
So many of his books have touched on things
that relate to Google as well.
Which is why I think that people here will
be interested in hearing what Vernor has to
say.
Why don't we start though by going way back
and I can't believe this.
It's like 46, 47 years ago.
That you published Bookworm Run.
Bookworm Run was the, I was gonna put that
up on the slide.
I don't have that here.
It's a little reminder of it.
Bookworm Run was a story about intelligence
applications.
And you use
A clever technique of saying, I don't know
how to understand enhancing a human beyond
what a human is.
'Cause that's smarter than me.
So you came with a clever technique.
Why don't you talk about the beginning of
that and reflect on what's happened in the
almost 50 years since you wrote that story?
>>Vernor: Um, that was a story that was part
of a sort of continuing conversation I had
with John W. Campbell.
I'll, as, the best editor of all time in science
fiction.
I remember I sent him a story once in which
I had a, an adult human.
Or who, who, that was super intelligent.
And he wrote, he rejected it.
And he wrote me back "I'm sorry Mr. Vinge.
You can't write this story.
And neither can anyone else."
>>Male Presenter: Thank you.
>>Vernor: So that should have given me a clue.
And the, the, the real clincher on the case
was that I showed such a story to my kid sister.
And, and, and, I told her that actually this
is about a superhuman, a human that was made
superhuman by being connected to a computer.
And then I said offhandedly, of course they
would try it out on animal models first.
And she looked at the story for a while and
said, "You know, this is really pretty boring.
Except for the part about the chimpanzee.”
And between John W. Campbell and my sister,
you know [sound of knocking head] it finally
got through to me that that's what I should
do.
So it was about a chimpanzee that then escaped.
And I, I, really wasn't thinking about it
of course in the context of the years that
followed.
But in the years that followed, I've gone
back and looked at it.
And actually, the last couple paragraphs,
is really kind of a, a summary of the to me,
the most important issues about the singularity.
The un knowability.
And the fact that it's, it's an intrinsically
different form of technological progress.
And it's essential, and it's qualitatively
different form of uncontrollability.
From the past.
So actually I'm very proud of that story.
It was the first story that I ever wrote that
sold.
And it started as an illustration I think
of having grown up to all, all the years of
reading science fiction and being exposed
to the early writing.
I don't mean the technical writing.
But the early popular writing of, of the founders
of the artificial intelligence field.
Like McCarthy and Minsky.
>>Male Presenter: I mean, I think the question
of intelligence application versus artificial
intelligence as a means of building a super
intelligence is a very interesting one.
And you certainly dug into it a long time
before most people did.
I wanna go away from the singularity bit though
and talk about cyber space.
Because this was another one of your novels
which I'm sorry to tell you is also, or this
was a novella about 30, over 30 years ago.
That you wrote this story.
How many of you have read True Names.
I think, great Google fans here.
For the rest of you I recommend going back.
We don't have free copies of it for you hear.
But first of all you came up with this marvelously
clever trope of taking the idea from magic
and fantasy stories that if a wizard knew
your true name, that gave them power over
you.
And you explored it by in many ways creating,
although you weren't the very first writer
to write it.
The concept of a cyberspace.
An immersive reality.
So since you wrote that story.
And at the time nothing existed except for
bulletin boards and a few mailing lists.
Since you wrote that story of course there
are a million attempts at cyberspace and virtual
reality.
Would you be, do you have any thoughts about
the past 30 years and where this story came
from and where you think it's going?
>>Vernor: Ah, the story, it came from several
things that were in my idea box.
And of those things of course came from stories
that I was reading.
And from things I was seeing in the real world.
What one was Ursula Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea
trilogy.
In which she makes a big deal of, and of course
this goes back to Rumpelstiltskin, of, if
you know something is true you have power
over it.
And in reading Wizard of Earthsea which is
frankly a fantasy.
She, uh, no bones about it.
But it occurred to me when I was reading The
Lord of the Rings, uh, The Hobbit.
That really this is all a science fiction
story in shallow disguise.
And the shallow disguise in the case of Wizard
of Earthsea is that there was some big database
that, that had deep information about things
keyed off their serial number.
And that was what the True Name was.
So that was a major, major issue that has
sort of been hanging fire in the idea box
for several years.
And then we just were beginning to get dial-up
access to San Diego State's time shared computer
in the late '70s. and you could check out
one of the two or three portable terminals
we had and take it home and you could actually
dial up from home.
And get on the, on the, on one of the two
dial in lines that we had to the time shared
computer.
And actually, that, of a, [pause] that was
enough of an experience that you, a person
could get a little bit of the flavor of what
it would be like to be floating around in
a space where you don't know everybody that
you're dealing with.
And in, in my collected stories anthology
I tell the, the, the, to me, this an awesome
true story about how I was, I had dialed in
and I was trying to do something on this rest,
uh, Dak system, and um
>>Male Presenter: You're old.
[feedback]
>>Vernor: And something, and I apparently
had left a talk program enabled.
And some guy started chatting me up.
And, you know, or you know, wanting to talk
to me.
And he didn't know who I was, I don't think.
And I didn't know who he was.
And so we just chatted for a while.
And then finally I said that, that, I had
other things to do.
But what I said was that I was going to have
to terminate the chat at this point.
Because actually I was a simulator, a simulated
personality.
Simulated program.
And if I kept talking for much longer that
would become obvious.
[laughter]
And so I cut the chat and, and then I just
sat back and I just realized that by the standard
of my whole life up till that point, I had
just lived a science fiction story.
[laughter]
And was very easy, it, it really True Names,
um, I think is by far the easiest science
fiction that I ever, ever wrote.
Easiest for me to write.
I just sat down and I wrote it.
And everything came out smoothly.
Using the magical tropes.
Which I think is, has been captured, well,
the statement that sufficiently, Clarke's
statement that sufficiently advanced science
is indistinguishable from magic.
That's actually, that's a great and a very
important point.
But it's not really the central thing about
True Names.
I think the central thing about True Names
is the usefulness of magical metaphors in
programming.
And I had enough exposure to that at that
time that it just made everything very, very
easy to do.
And every time I needed an action thing, all
I had to do was, was, was resort to mapping
software concepts across into the real world.
And I don't think I used this in the story,
but it illustrates the point.
The, in, in, when you talk about processes
that you have zombies and uh, and, and child
processes and things like that.
And almost, this is sort of the reverse of
using magical metaphors to do things in the
computer world.
Almost everything that we do in the computer
world and in operating systems inspires an
application in the real world.
It doesn't just inspire an analogy in the
real world.
If there isn't already an application corresponding
to something in the software realm, it means
that somebody is missing a bet.
[pause]
>>Male Presenter: hmmm.
Well I think you’re selling yourself short.
Because there were things in True Names that
came through into the future.
You know gangs of hackers hiding out in cyberspace.
Hanging out.
People pretending to be bots, and having contests
about who can be a bot.
One that didn't come through was the idea
of a complete immersive reality over a very
small bandwidth.
>>Vernor: Right, there's also that is teetering
on the edge of coming true or not.
And that is the notion that the military is
exceptionally good at this.
[laughter]
>>Male Presenter: True.
I mean, we have ourselves at DFF fought a
number of cases now over defending the anonymity
of people acting online.
Getting their, so I mean, it all comes in
many ways right out of True Names.
So that story deserves to be read by all of
you who haven’t' read it.
Now.
I've put up the cover of Marooned in Realtime.
We're not actually gonna talk about Marooned
in Realtime unless you'd like to.
But this was the first novel in which the
singularity had occurred already by the time
that you wrote the book.
And I remember your early essays on the subject.
When you started talking about it was impossible
to write stories about these kind of beings
that we certainly had no ability to understand.
And the singularity was, to me it seemed you
were using a metaphor in mathematics of course.
It's a discontinuity.
And a function or a derivative of a function.
And you used that discontinuity as a metaphor
for unpredictability.
For being undefined.
Is that a pretty good description of what
you meant by the term?
>>Vernor: Right.
In, in math, you know a place where you have
a description that breaks.
And you put it well.
In that it's not, it, it, it's not necessarily
that anything is becoming infinite.
And in fact, something becoming infinite is
sort of a, a, a symptom in your model.
That the model is gonna break there.
Something else is gonna happen.
For instance, Shock Waves are an example of,
uh, a singularity in the equations for um,
incompressible flow.
And the shock wave, in partial differential
equation models for highway traffic is simply
a chain reaction from a rear end collision.
So a different model takes over.
So it, it, that was one reason why the term
"singularity" is, I think, very appropriate
term.
Another thing is my analogy with the most
famous example of a singularity in physics
models, which is in general relativity.
And that is with the black hole.
That there’s very little information that
you can extract from inside the black hole.
If you're outside the black hole.
And that, as a metaphor, I think is very appropriate
for looking at what things would be like if
there were superhuman intelligent critters
running around.
>>Male Presenter: So you wrote the essay "The
coming technological singularity" which gelled
your ideas together and got the word out in
front of people.
But you were thinking about it for a while
before then.
>>Vernor: Uh, basically as a child, I was
immersed in science fiction and the beginnings
of people talking about AI.
And in that era and in the first part of the
20th century, there were people writing about
some sort of transformative era of superhuman
beings thousands of years from now.
Uh, so, um, that was, that was common.
Then in the, around 1960, you began to get
people--.
>>Male Presenter: Do you want something to
drink by the way?
>>Vernor: No, I'm fine.
You began to get people who were talking about
hit happening a lot sooner than thousands
of years from now.
And so that's what, that's what really was
inspiring me when I wrote Bookworm Run.
Then in 1982, I was, I was both lucky and,
and, mainly lucky.
My, I'd, come out with True Names.
And Marvin Minsky invited me to be on a panel
with him and um, um, Jim Hogan.
And Bob Sheckley.
Two science fiction writers.
At a Triple AI '82.
At Carnegie Mellon.
And so we're sitting at this panel and talking
about these things, and, um, and, and I trotted
out this metaphor with the singularity and
how in my opinion
>>Male Presenter: [inaudible]
>>Vernor: the really significant thing would
not be human equivalent intelligence but what
would happen shortly after that.
And of course, the, the maximum proponents
of AI research, were you know, this is very,
this is something they certainly were thinking
about and talking about.
But for me, it just sort of popped out and
it was the, it, on the panel and, and the
strength of the metaphor really impressed
me and I was very, very proud of myself.
And I, and afterwards there, one of the editors
at Omni was there.
And he came up and wanted me to do an op ed
piece.
So that was the first time I had written about
it.
Then Marooned in Realtime was, came out, a
couple of years after that.
And I, and I think you mentioned I didn't
write about the singularity itself.
Marooned in Realtime is a perfect example
of writing around the edges of it.
In the case of Marooned in Realtime, it takes
place 50 million years from now.
And it's after the singularity.
And basically it, I don't know how many people
here have read or looked at Dougal Dixon's
book, After Man.
It's a little bit like After People except
I think much, ah, well it's a different focus.
It's 50 million years.
It's not pretending everybody went away tomorrow.
But 50 million years from now gave me a wonderful
opportunity to do what Dougal Dixon did in
pictures.
But also do it with the issue of what got
rid of the human race?
And I think very few rationalists would figure
that the human race is gonna be around in
a recognizable form on earth 50 million years
from now.
But their, their reasons for explaining why
we're not around would essentially range the
gamut of human fears and dreams.
And the fun thing about writing Marooned in
Realtime is, I have a small number of humans
who essentially have using that spherical
thing you see there.
>>Male Presenter: A little bit of magic in
science fiction.
>>Vernor: A little bit of magic.
Have stopped time for themselves inside the
bauble.
And when it, when it bursts, they are alive
again, and it's 50 million years later.
And there's about 200 humans.
So you know, two or three times as many people
that are, that are here.
It's a whole human race.
And they're looking around.
And they have the range of theories that you
could imagine.
I have, I did it as a detective story.
Which by the way, for those of you who are
into writing, detective stories have one awesome
virtue.
And that is that it allows you to go around
and sample diverse opinions.
Strung together with the overt excuse that
you're solving a mystery.
A murder mystery.
But I, I had one green.
Monica Raines.
She was convinced that we had all done ourselves
in because of our, of our, terrible attitude
towards the environment.
And there was, it's 50 million years in the
future, there actually was supporting evidence
for this.
You could see all this incredible extinction
that happened if you were drawing species.
Species population plots.
They go like this.
And then decrease to zero in the anthropocene,
or whatever they call it now is this incredibly
narrow line across the sedimentary horizon.
And then after that, there's no people.
And the largest mammals are rats.
Which then radiatively adapt into all the
slots.
Essentially all the slots that we have large
mammals in nowadays.
>>Male Presenter: That actually brings me
to another question I wanted to ask about.
'Cause you gave a talk that Stewart Brand
asked you to do.
What if the singularity doesn't happen.
And you they, so um, I mean can you continue
talking about Marooned in Realtime as well,
but I'd be kind of interested to think about
the theories about where there wasn't any
kind of massive human improvement and, what
are the opponents to your ideas?
And how do they work out.
>>Vernor: Right.
Right.
Ahh.
Let me just say a little bit more
>>Male Presenter: No.
Go ahead.
>>Vernor: about Marooned in Realtime.
So Monica Raines had that idea.
Then there was a group that figured that some
space aliens had finally detected that humans
had attained intelligence.
And they had come and exterminated us all.
And there was hard evidence for that actually
in the story.
There were surviving if you can imagine how
you could write records that would survive
on earth for 50 million years.
But there were some very fragmentary evidence
of massive kinetic attack.
And then there were people who were peddling
the singularity as the explanation.
And so I was able to do my little editorializing
about the singularity and how that was a lot
of fun.
And one of the chief engineers of making this
meeting happen at 50 million years got herself
murdered.
So there really was there really was some
reason to to try to solve both the large scale
mystery of what had happened to the human
race and the small scale.
So, in the event, I didn't have to actually
say what the singularity really was.
One thing about the singularity is that it's
a scenario.
And I am actually a very big fan of scenario
based planning.
And I partly of course it fits the way that
science fiction writer's head works.
But also because I think, in a world as uncertain
as our world, and still being a world that
we do have to live in and we do have to try
to plan around, scenarios are by far the best
way of attacking that.
So with scenarios you basically, and, this
is done a lot outside of science fiction now.
Like with global business network.
You identify major parameters.
You try to identify major parameters of change.
And then you use those parameters to assert
extremely different possible futures.
And those futures should be as extremely unlikely
as your sponsoring entity can tolerate before
they kick you out the door and cut all your
funding off.
[laughter]
Once you've identified those extreme possibilities.
Say four, five of these scenarios, try to
flesh them out.
And typically the way you flesh them out is
you pretend it's 2050 or 2070 or whatever
and write an essay about why, in retrospect,
it was obvious that this particular scenario
was inevitable.
[laughter]
In doing that, you generate a, a series of
symptoms.
And then you're in a situation where in the
real world, you can look at all of those symptoms,
you can organize them.
And they are things to watch for.
And there are, is at least one very famous
example of, of a group that did this.
And managed to avoid extreme disaster because
what the rest of the world was looking at
and thought was just a statistical blip, they
were looking at and saying, oh, that's a little
bit like that wild-ass scenario on oil prices
that we had in our scenario-based planning
session last year.
And were able to keep their options open just
long enough, or well enough, so that they
were able to avoid the catastrophe that befell
the people who were depending merely on trend
lines and forecast uncertainties.
So the thing with the singularity is a scenario
certainly a person should be imagining scenarios
where the singularity doesn't happen.
And if you Google on what if the singularity
does not happen, the first hit, the last time
I looked, was this talk that I gave at Long
Now, for Stewart Brand.
>>Male Presenter: If it drops down, we can
fix that for you.
[laughter]
>>Vernor: Ah, the god-like power of, uh.
And in that, in, there are obvious ways actually
that the singularity wouldn't happen.
And in my talk I, I pretty much kept those
off the table.
The easiest way for the singularity to, not
to happen is if the world gets blown up.
Everybody dies before it happens.
The machine should keep this in mind, by the
way.
Because if something happened to all the machines,
some rainy night, we humans would get, would
put them back at least in the present situation,
in a very short time.
We just can't help ourselves.
You know?
That's what we do.
We build and we build machines.
On the other hand.
If before, if, if human kind actually something
very bad happened to it and it, it was destroyed,
and the machines had not reached whatever
they're gonna reach, it's very possible that
that the machines would never be built.
In other words, those machines don't build
themselves before they exist.
But we have a proof of principle here that
humans actually have a sort of durability
in the natural world.
They can arise in the natural world.
So that's actually
>>Male Presenter: But you haven't seen Prometheus
yet.
I mean.
[laughter]
>>Vernor: You're right.
I haven't seen Prometheus.
>>Male Presenter: That's OK.
>>Male #1: Imagine a better [inaudible]
>>Male Presenter: That's right.
Absolutely.
[laughter]
>>Vernor: Paul Anderson actually wrote a story
where in which the human race went extinct
at some point, and there was no singularity
before they went extinct.
But they in Australia or something like that,
they had an experiment and they actually built
very simple Von Neumann mach—you know the
alleged machines that can make more of themselves.
And they could just barely do it with natural,
with the natural things that are in the environment.
And after four or five billion years they
did evolve into a machine-based life form.
I think that's a much harder thing to happen
than biological life.
>>Male Presenter: Alright.
>>Male #2: [inaudible]
>>Vernor: Oh, the story I heard was that an
intelligence unit at Royal Dutch/Shell in
the early '80s. the people that were working
there were using scenario based planning.
And in fact some of them went on to found
Global Business Network.
This story by the way is just me talking off
the top of my head.
I make no claims about how well you can verify
this.
But at that time, and this was at the time
of the say the first oil shock, and so there
were estimates being done of future prices
on oil.
And so 100 dollar a barrel oil was essentially
accepted by everybody as on the near horizon.
The only question is, what were the error
bars.
Around it.
And a terrific opportunity to invest enormous
amounts of money in exploration.
And a lot of people did.
And I imagine that Royal Dutch/Shell did,
too.
But they had a, when they did their scenario
based planning, one of their scenarios was,
"What if the price of oil stays."
I don't know if the word low is the right
word.
But relatively low.
Crazy crazy assumption or scenario.
But they had, you know they had done some
detail work and what the thing would look
like and that sorta stuff.
And then as the decade, as the decade progressed
and the prices did not explode, the people
who didn't have that contrarian possibility
in their head along with the presumably the
symptoms were just not in the position to
do the pattern matching on it.
That the people who had done the scenario.
>>Male Presenter: I know we're not gonna have
all the time to cover all the topics.
We could do a couple of hours talking about
what you wrote about in this book.
So I wanted to ask you about a couple of them.
My favorite phrase from this book and I've
told you before, is "applied theology".
Which was a study that was out there.
Because in A Fire Upon The Deep, there is
a post-singularity zone outside the galaxy
and through a little magical maguffin it doesn't
happen inside the galaxy.
>>Vernor: It's impossible.
It's a slow zone.
Right.
>>Male Presenter: That's right.
But so the beings who live outside the galaxy
are as gods.
They're not real gods.
They don't have superpowers of gods.
But they are as gods to the, compared to us.
And so one thing I was interested in is that
there sometimes seems to be a mixing of questions
that come from religion.
And questions that come related to the singularity
and advanced AI and so on.
And I wondered if you had more thoughts on
that.
>>Vernor: The term "applied theology" is,
I'm sitting there writing this story.
It's a magic term because it actually invokes
so many different things in the minds of,
a, a lot of readers.
And in my case, and in that story, the notion
was simply that, that, not right where we
are talking, but within distances that you
could communicate across, there were things
that were pretty demonstrably god-like.
And there also was, because of artificial
intelligence studies and things like that,
there was deep understanding of the sorts
of things you could do to make that happen.
Unlike our universe where I suspect that that
deep understanding will quickly lead to being
able to do it.
In this situation, they knew as long as they
stay inside the safe zone, that all that the
gods can do to them is play with their heads.
Which is bad enough.
But you know it's not quite the same as them
being able to, able to arrive and mess around
otherwise.
And so you get universities that their version
of computer science they might have computer
science.
But the, the more serious and also driftier
subject was applied theology.
Which was how to deal with these beings on
the outside.
And it was, it sort of varied between being
totally inane and bogus, and being much, much
too dangerous to deal with.
And some of the characters in the story for
instance, the, a major character in this story
is an RV.
A [chuckles] controlled by the gods.
A god.
So this remotely piloted vehicle just looks
like a person.
And he is actually under the control you know
as a remote device, of, of by a god.
And he is capable of causing an enormous amount
of, an enormous amount of trouble.
>>Male Presenter: So, yeah, the other thing
of course that you developed wonderfully here
was the idea of an intergalactic social network.
Online bulletin board.
Which you based in part on some of the networks
that existed in that day.
Now we have a lot more bandwidth.
So it's not quite the same.
But you were looking at this low bandwidth.
>>Vernor: Oh.
Oh yeah.
>>Male Presenter: So I don't know if you have
any thoughts about that.
I think we're going to, you said something
to me earlier on which I think we'll get to,
your most recent book hadn't really thought
of.
That you thought The Tines were an example
of extreme social networking.
And if you’ve read The Tines, which begin
in actually they begin in a story called The
Blabber.
But there's they're seen in their full form
in this book for the first time.
>>Vernor: Yeah.
A Fire Upon The Deep was written probably
the late '80s early '90s. came out around
'92 and so we were in one of the early popularity
blushes of the internet so you had Usenet.
And you had these other low bandwidth things.
So a big component of the story is, imagine
a galactic internet.
An, where you have millions of worlds.
In, in fact, there was actually a posting
on Usenet at the time.
I think where someone sneered that the, if
there were such a, if there were such an internet,
it would be so expensive that you know, you
wouldn't just bust your parents budget for
a month if you overused it, you'd be selling
your home race into slavery for 1000 years
just to pay the Telco fees.
[laughter]
I had
>>Male Presenter: YouTube is basically like
that.
So.
[laughter]
>>Vernor: I had great fun with writing that,
that part actually went very smoothly although
in the back of my mind, you know, was the
notion that this is going to look so lame
in 10 years.
Probably in one year.
In fact, if it looks lame before it even gets
published, it's really gonna be an embarrassment.
So there's little things throughout the story
where I tried to make, to make the point that,
this is not what planetary networks looked
like.
A network on the surface of a planet.
And in fact, I felt totally excused and I
would use this argument if a fan came up and
beat me over the head with it in 1995.
I felt totally excused by the fact that 50,000
bits per second superluminal is not something
that anybody has any business complaining
about in the year 1995.
[laughter]
>>Male Presenter: I'll take it.
I'll even take the thing in The Blabber with
>>Vernor: Oh, in The Blabber!
>>Male Presenter: half a bit per second.
>>Vernor: In The Blabber they're just inside
the slow zone by six light years.
Can you imagine what that would be like if
the, super, if faster than light travel that
was another thing that happened when you went
across from the slow zone to the beyond.
And go further, you'd get super intelligence.
They were so close and they knew that if they
just settled the planet a little bit further
on they’d' have faster than light travel.
So they're stuck there.
And it turns out that actually you can get
superluminal communication at, in that position.
If you're willing to dim the sun a little
bit for your power.
[laughter]
And so they actually have what Ursula Le Guin
called an ansible.
This ansible can do something like six bits
an hour.
[pause]
And so if you wait for a day or so, you can
actually communicate simple messages onto
the real internet.
The, what I call the Known Net.
Which was.
And I never used this in a class at school.
But in a CS class, that would be a good example
between the, for the difference between bit-rates
and bit-rate speed, and speed of propagation.
>>Male Presenter: Although it's kind a like
when my phone goes to GPRS.
It's very similar.
>>Vernor: Oh.
Yeah except the person you're talking about
is still on earth.
>>Male Presenter: That's right.
You know we have so many topics so I don't
know if I'm gonna let you pick which things
you're most interest to go on about.
In this novel you of course went into the
regular laws of physics for your space colonization
and that was great.
But there were a couple of really cool things
in here.
Aside from that the smart dust that you developed.
And the second thing, something that's now
become a theme with you, which is mind control.
The bad guys in this novel are really bad.
And one of the things they do is they have
a little virus they can use to turn you into
this totally focused person as sort of a mental
slave that will work very hard on a problem
and so you can do things that are, that a
human can do that an AI can't do.
But the funny thing is I know many people
who said they wanna get your
>>Vernor: Oh yeah!
>>Male Presenter: focus virus when they have
a deadline, they would love to have it.
So if you wanna talk about altering the mind
and your thoughts on that.
That would be cool.
>>Vernor: I do distinguish between what amphetamines
would do and what focus would do.
To me they are two different things.
The idea of focus was it could make you seriously
and monomaniacally interested in a topic.
Presumably a topic that you already had spent
years learning about.
And in a certain ghastly way I was proud of
this invention.
I actually have a mechanism for doing it in
the story.
And it is a solution to the, solution or response
to those optimists among us, including me,
who hope and believe that slavery is not economically
feasible in a high tech civilization.
And I have a high tech a moderately high tech
civilization in The Deepness In The Sky.
And they are, they are for sure a slave-owning
society.
And what they do is they have the ability
to convert specialists into focused specialists.
Who then really have not very much interest
in anything except their specialty.
And they can be driven, can be driven to extremes
on that.
And this is actually a way that they actually
can do things.
This is in a part of the universe where the
singularity is not possible.
They can actually do things that nowadays
we would expect automation to be able to do.
For instance in the story, one of the normal
humans, a citizen of this tyranny, he's called
a pilot-manager.
Because basically he has a team of these people
who actually do the piloting.
And they do a very good job except at one
point they encounter a vehicle that actually
has anti-gravity.
Which no one knows anything about.
And so it doesn't, it doesn't behave according
to the laws of celestial mechanics.
And the actual pilots, these focused persons,
they just you know, it takes, it they essentially
go to pieces.
As you can imagine somebody who had a, Isaac
Newton if he had a great deal of intuition,
and he did of course, about, about central
force problems.
He probably would have been driven to distraction
if he had encountered an apple that fell upwards.
Actually, Schmitt did that in Analog many
years ago.
>>Male Presenter: Oh did he?
>>Vernor: Yeah.
>>Male Presenter: Now you return to the slaves
actually in a story recently where you suggested
that if you ever find yourself working at
a company with really great working conditions
>>Vernor: Ha.
>>Male Presenter: Unlimited free foods
>>Vernor: [laughs]
>>Male Presenter: You know, nice views and
games and sports.
The only
>>Vernor: He's very scared.
>>Male Presenter: The only explanation is
you're actually an uploaded slave.
>>Vernor: Right
[laughter]
>>Male Presenter: I'm spoiling that story
a little bit.
>>Vernor: Yes, you will spoil the story.
That story is called The Cookie Monster.
And actually, and actually the title gives
the story away.
And it gives a counter measure that the people
who are trapped in the story undertake to
you know, outwit the, once they figure out
what's going on, to outwit the guy who's resetting
them at the end of each day.
>>Male Presenter: Now to continue on that
theme.
Why would someone write a story with something
like self-driving cars, automatic reality
tools that you wear all the time, a big giant
company that's scanning all the books in some
cavalier way.
[laughter]
Who were you thinking about when you wrote
this novel.
>>Vernor: Oh.
I, there was a moment writing this novel that
was even worse than my fears about the internet
in Fire Upon The Deep.
And that was, it became, it, you know I hadn't
been paying too, I hadn't been paying enough
attention to what was going on.
And I realized that there were things I was
writing about that you know, were probably
gonna be done and they were gonna be done
better than I was doing them before my book
could come out.
I mean, it's bad enough to be scooped after
your book comes out.
But this it was very clear that this was going
on an arguably it had already happened with
some of the things that Google was doing.
So if you're reading this book, there's this
little paragraph, but didn't Google do that
back in 2006?
And there's some discussion of what is different.
And actually the discussion, some of the discussion
comes down to the very legal issues that are
dragging all of this out.
>>Male Presenter: I can't yet tell you what
other things in Rainbow's End are under development
at Google.
[laughter]
>>Vernor: Yes, you tantalized me with that
by email.
>>Male Presenter: But I am going to take you
for a ride in a chauffeured car tomorrow.
>>Vernor: Oh.
Excellent.
>>Male Presenter: So that'll be something
good.
But no, this book again, it's a fabulous book.
I think one of the best of the first decade
of our new century.
In terms of going forward with that.
But you brought, you had the mind control
in here as well.
The you gotta believe me or whatever it was
called.
>>Vernor: Oh yes.
Oh, it was sort of a maguffin.
It was a threat.
The way you know, the way in the 20th century
there were, and now I suppose, there are certain
technologies that haven't happened but we're
afraid they're going to happen.
And you gotta, YGBM, you gotta believe me.
That was the new maximum fear.
And in, in the story there actually is a technology
where you, where first of all you infect everybody.
Biologically.
With something that is mellow and is not really
recognized by the public health authorities.
However it is something that certain visual
stimuli can cause to activate.
So at that point you've melded biowarfare
with information warfare.
To the extent that you can target individuals
or you can target whole populations like,
you gotta see this latest viral, you know
>>Male Presenter: In the book it's a good
way to get people to click on ads, basically
right?
>>Vernor: Uh.
In the book actually it never happens.
It's something that.
>>Male Presenter: That's right.
>>Vernor: I have a vil-, the villain in the
story is a guy who is so upset about that
he's essentially decided that he has to take
over the world and prevent it from happening.
[chuckles]
>>Male Presenter: That's right.
No, no we're not.
This is not one of the things we're working
on.
>>Vernor: Ah, that's good.
>>Male Presenter: I will make an official
denial of that.
So since I wanna leave some times for questions,
let's go to your most recent novel.
And you obviously were very fascinated by
the characters you created earlier on which
were hive minds.
Which were the individual members were not
themselves sentient.
Fully sentient or conscious.
Sort of a grand social network.
So tell us what's fascinated you so much about
The Tines and why you came back to them for
this novel.
And what else you wanna explore in that.
>>Vernor: The Tines were extremely easy to
write about.
In fact The Tines, which are these dog-like
packs of, individually smarter than dogs but
not as smart as humans.
And a pack of four to eight of them is humanly
intelligent.
And they're, they really, the analog really
is a local area network.
They are local area networks and they use
sound actually, ultrasonic bands, in order
to transmit their information.
If you think about the bit-rates involved
and if you know anything about attenuation
of stuff over 100,000 hertz, sound over 100,000
hertz.
There are really some constraints that this
implies.
And it just drove the story.
It just was so, that part of the story was
even easier to write than True Names.
And I could just sit there writing one cliché
after another.
And every cliché took on a new meaning.
Like, I'm of two minds on that issue.
[laughter]
Or you know I may be a little bit pregnant.
[laughter]
Or why don't you have your conscience go for
a walk?
[laughter]
It just streamed out.
It was just so wonderful.
And that part of the story, unlike the space
part of the story, was very easy to, easy
to write.
Now, the social network issue.
It didn't arise among The Tines in my opinion
in A Fire Upon The Deep.
However in The Deepness In The Sky, I come
perilously close to breaking one of my background
assumptions which is that you can't have super
human intelligence in this part of the universe.
And that is the question of what happens when
you get, when you put large numbers of these
doggy creatures together in one room.
Like if you replaced all of you with individual
Tine members, that's called a choir, by the
way, among The Tines.
And it's generally regarded as a form of self-abuse
in the same way that that means, [chuckles]
same way what that means in American English.
And in other words, a choir maybe having a
good time, but it's not doing anything constructive
and it's not much smarter, it's not as smart
as an individual pack, certainly.
And it turns out that that's a little bit
of a cultural bias in that.
On the part of the Tines who keep themselves
whole, hold their minds more closely.
And large, large groups like that are sort
of smart but in a kind of an odd way.
And they, and in the tropics they, they congregate
by the millions.
And so there is some stuff in the story where
they’re flying along in a dirigible and
they're looking down at this city slum that
goes on forever.
That's just Tines.
And they're so crowded that they can't form
individual minds.
And you look down and you can actually see
compressional, things that look like compressional
waves.
In other words, you can see ideas percolating
across the, across the face of the public.
In the positioning of--.
We're not seeing the sound.
We’re just seeing small behavioral changes
that happen as some particular idea sweeps
through the population.
And it's sort of striking at least to the
people who are watching because they finally
get an idea that although it's, although it's
only going at the speed of sound, which means
there's some real issues, you can actually
see the spread of memes in the body politic.
>>Male Presenter: So, if some folks in the
audience would like to come up and ask questions,
come to the microphone so the people on VC
can hear you.
And then if there's some VC folks we'll let
you sort of interrupt after one or two here.
And I'll just finally end up with, or we can
go directly to them just to ask you about
where, what in the future you'd like to talk
about.
What books are you working on?
What ideas are really exciting you about the
future of the internet and communications
and so on?
>>Male #2: Yeah.
So thanks for coming.
So a while back I was having a conversation
at a party with a friend of a friend, who
worked at a rival company's operating system.
And of course it was good natured ribbing.
Because he told me sort of the elaborate steps
he'd taken to run the soft, run the operating
system in a stable fashion.
And you know we were talking about what makes
for good software design and things like that.
And I said "Well, you know, have you ever
considered that there might be, you know,
an upper limit to the size of the software
project that not just any one person but any
group of people can manage."
And I jokingly said "Well, why don't we call
that limit, like One Vista?"
It was just a suggestion.
But somebody who works
>>Male Presenter: OK.
Question or long polemics in the form of a
question or both
>>Male #2: Sorry.
It's leading to a question.
It's leading to a question.
The, issue is that like, it seems like to
me that I see a lot of limitations to software
design because I work in computer security.
I see bugs, I see things failing.
And I see a lot of people being very optimistic
and sort of lots of "this time it's different."
Right?
The question for me is, it seems like a lot
of the arguments about the singularity seem
rooted in another set of biases that I also
share, Cause I grew up in a period of accelerating
change.
And it seems like to me that some of our thinking
on the issue of the singularity, the fact
that we have university people devoted to
studying it and things like that, might be
biased by the fact, by the particular historical
epoch we exist in.
Right?
Which is one of accelerating change.
And sort of the neuro types that people who
are good at computer science.
How much are you worried about that as sort
of a concern about the likelihood of the singularity?
>>Vernor: Single most likely reason that there
is such a limit is certainly, the software
does not seem to be going as well as the hardware.
I think that's really, if you were gonna write
that scenario, that would be near the top
of the list.
I must say also though that one of the few
times that I dabbled in the real world, was
a programming job and I remember being on
the customer site and we had some bug, you
know, they made us come out because the stuff
we were selling them wasn't working.
In some particular situation.
Turned out to be a bug.
Our bug.
It actually turned out to be my bug.
But I didn't know that at the time.
And so we were sitting there and one of the
customers, engineer sticks his head in the
door.
He says "Hey, you know, I just came across,
I heard this thing that really it's impossible
to write programs longer than 50,000 lines.
Because there will be enough bugs that they
can't work."
And we had just broken through the 50,000
line limit.
So you know, "Go away!" you know?
I think you guys are beyond 50,000 lines
[laughter]
And so, I, I, think there probably isn't an
upper limit.
Although what they call programming in the
grand new era may not look at all like what
we call programming now.
>>Male #3: So, I promise this will be shorter.
[laughter]
In The Deepness In The Sky you use possibly
my favorite phrase of all time which is "Tyranny
is when a government controlled code has to
run on every node in the network."
[laughter]
And I wonder how close you think we are to
that or whether it'll be entertainment industry
code has to run on every node?
[laughter]
>>Vernor: I think the first is more likely
than the, attempts at the first are more likely
than the second.
And I don't think that the enforcement of
government, I think the enforcement of government
code is definitely something that countries
will attempt.
I think it would break but it could be, the
way it breaks could be a nightmare.
>>Male Presenter: When I see the movie industry
I just say, I see dead people and they don't
know they're dead.
So.
Steal their metaphors.
Come ahead.
>>Male #4: So other than the singularity and
group minds, two of your really consistent
themes are betrayals, a lot of your conflicts
come out in betrayal.
And also anarcho-libertarian utopias.
So those seem to me to be kind of at odds
with each other.
Uh, are those coming out of the same place?
Or how do those interact for you.
>>Vernor: I wasn’t' aware of the betrayal
theme although if you have through about it,
I actually, I'm willing to buy it.
If a person goes back and looks.
Certainly I'm aware of the libertarian-anarcho
capitalist thing.
I regard the, the, the libertarian-anarcho
capitalist thing as you really kind of, um,
the progression of all sorts of good things
that have happened.
If you go back.
If you go back to the year 1200.
And you try to, a time machine, and you try
to explain to some, um, noble lord why democracy
actually works better.
And freedom and intellectual freedom works
better, he might be the rare sort of person
who would listen to you.
That's possible.
That he would listen to you.
But would be quite right to laugh in your
face and say "You know what would happen?
If I tried to, if I tried to open myself up
to that, tomorrow, I would be dead.
There would be another clown up here on the
hill.
And he would be doing the same thing that
I'm doing.
What you're talking about is anarchy.
And it is impossible."
What happened in those 800 years between then
and now?
It's actually very hard, thinking about it,
I would, it would be hard for me to construct
a fantasy science fiction story to say how
we got from there to now.
I'd almost have to point at the real world
as my only example.
And to me the stuff that, like if you read
The Ungoverned.
Which is my sort of purist take on anarcho-capitalism,
if you, look at that, I think you, I deliberately
try to underplay that.
Except for the nuclear weapons.
And
>>Male Presenter: Minor exception
>>Vernor: Yeah.
I, I think actually if a libertarian-anarcho
capitalist world was not quieter and more
peaceful than now, it wouldn't work.
It would, actually there's a difference between
me and some I think, and some advocates.
>>Male #5: Hi.
First, I wanna say that A Fire Upon The Deep
and your other books are among my favorites
of all time.
>>Vernor: Thank you.
>>Male #5: Thank you for bringing them to
me.
As somebody who used to toil away in the gloom
behind the fence at Lawrence Livermore Lab,
I was very amused by the role of the lab played
in the Peace War.
[laughter]
I'm wondering about your thoughts and how
the lab came, how did the lab come to feature
in that role in your book?
>>Vernor: I had friends up at Lawrence Livermore.
And it was, it geographically a well placed.
I that, I think that is close, and to me a
beautiful, a beautiful area.
I had visited Poul Anderson has, uh, used
to live in Orinda.
I visited him there and I looked around.
And then I also, I also visited the place.
Very unofficially I discovered some things
about their security.
[laughter]
I don't mean I got through their security.
I mean I discovered things about their security
when it worked on me.
But one thing I did try to make it clear that
this was a civilian subcontractor who did
these terrible things.
That brought it into the world as we knew
it.
So yeah, I, right now off the top of my head,
I can't point to anything, any other you know
significant thing that I knew about what was
happening there.
>>Male #5: Well, it put the [inaudible], you
know an all new, whole new life.
Thanks.
>>Vernor: [laughs]
>>Male Presenter: I'm sure that San Diego
State university library enjoyed your
>>Vernor: Oh, UCSD.
>>Male Presenter: Oh, UCSD library.
Sorry that's write.
Enjoyed being featured even more.
>>Vernor: Actually, they enjoyed being featured
more.
>>Male #6: Would you say the Tines are more
Google plus or Facebook?
[laughter]
No, no, no, uh.
>>Vernor: The Tines, as in a Fire Upon The
Deep, I would say are really not social networks.
>>Male #6: We're talking here about like,
the singularity.
If it happened.
Would you be able to tell?
>>Vernor: Would you be able to die?
>>Male #6: To tell.
That it had happened.
>>Vernor: Oh.
That's a very important question on I've fairly
extensive rant on it.
I think the answer is probably, and if you
could, it would be very spectacularly evident.
On the other hand, a person can make up scenarios,
you know, where it wouldn't and there is this.
You know the singularity stuff, has, by, to
some of its critics, it's been mocked as a
digital rapture.
>>Male #6: Yeah.
>>Vernor: That it's isomorphic to talking
about apocalyptic issues.
I'll tell you one thing.
If there are people that predict that the
singularity will happen on a particular date,
and if it doesn't happen, I think you're likely
to
>>Male #6: Isn't that kind of Kurzweil?
>>Vernor: Pardon?
>>Male #6: Isn't that kind of Kurzweil?
>>Vernor: Um.
>>Male Presenter: Yes, it's May 14th, 2045
at 4:62 pm.
>>Male #6: You know what.
>>Male Presenter: You notice the hours are
longer.
>>Vernor: And I said, I'd be happy, if if
can happen I'd be surprised if it hasn't happened
by 2030.
So, there's
>>Male Presenter: Now, Charlie, who's one
of the people who uses that 'rapture of the
nerds' term, Charlie Stross, has a story in
which some characters are running as digitally
uploaded minds inside a space capsule the
size of a coke can, on their way to another
star, debating whether the singularity has
happened or not.
[laughter]
>>Male #6: Well yeah.
An exponent.
I mean using the classic thing an exponential
curve is self-similar.
>>Vernor: Ah, yes, and that's a good point
that is often ignored by people who talk about
exponential curves.
The, actually the importance of the exponential
curve is not the curve so much as the fact
that if a certain scale or, in many cases
if a certain scalar gets larger than a certain
size, other things happen that are very spectacular.
And so the exponential curve itself is you
know, uh, is, just a part of that.
But what, I think that there is a possibility
that if very hard predictions are made and
then it doesn’t happen, you will see people
come out and say, "It happened but you didn't
notice."
I promise not to do that.
[laughter]
>>Male Presenter: Now from the other side
of the singularity, here's Thad.
[laughter]
>>Male #7: So one of your big themes in Rainbow's
End was education.
And as a professor, it was particularly scary,
that vision.
First of all do you think it's actually viable?
Do you think it's desirable?
And if it is desirable, how do we take our
traditional institutions like say Georgia
Tech and get them ready for such a event?
>>Vernor: So when you say desirable you're
talking about the singularity right?
>>Male #7: No, I'm not talking about the singularity
at all.
I'm talking simply about how you do education
in Rainbow's End.
Where people are, facilitators are the--
>>Vernor: Right.
Actually, at least in the run up to the singularity,
avoiding talking about the singularity itself.
But in the run-up to the singularity, I think
major features are going to be drastic decline
in the price of effective education.
Say, a factor of 10 or 100.
In a dollar cost.
Not necessarily in the mind cost of the person
trying to learn.
And I think that is going to have a devastating
effect on the, large classes of people that
are trying to make money out of education.
On the other hand, freeing up the mechanisms
for assigning credit, that is, you have a
diploma now, making that a more flexible process,
and making the process of delivering the information
10 to 100 times cheaper, I think that's going
to happen and I think the economic demand
for it is going to be very, very high.
And like everything else that's happening,
it's gonna be great for everybody except for
certain people who are actually embedded in
the old way of doing things.
As a person who is a writer, who is trying
to cope with eBooks and is trying to cope
with e-duplication, that's my red queen's
race.
Well, you guys in education have your own
red queen's race, too.
>>Male Presenter: Just, Vernor of course was
an eBook pioneer of this is where I actually
first worked with you.
>>Vernor: Along with Brad.
>>Male Presenter: Yeah, I published this anthology
of science fiction works back in 1993 and
the Fire Upon The Deep.
>>Vernor: That's the reader.
No, that's the disk?
>>Male Presenter: That's the disk.
A Fire Upon The Deep is on here by the way.
And it's actually done as a hypertext book
because Vernor gave me all of his notes.
He is an old time programmer.
So when he writes his text he puts hash tag
comments
[laughter]
I can't remember what character you use as
the first character.
In all those.
It was an explanation point.
>>Vernor: No.
Carrot.
>>Male Presenter: Carrot.
So, he put all his comments in so you could
actually see how he wrote the book which was
cool.
And unfortunately I don't have the rights
to sell this anymore.
I do sometimes auction them for charity.
One of the things though that his helped contribute
is it added the phrase Hexapodian as a key
insight to the nerd vernacular.
Now you'll hear that from people from time
to time.
Go ahead.
>>Male # 8: Yeah, my comment on can we tell
the singularity.
It sounds like the singularity is just the
marching morons with the numbers reversed.
You know the intelligent people have gone
off and left the ones who couldn't keep up
behind.
But that's not my question.
Question is, in Fire Upon The Deep, you know
some really intelligent people went and poked
at stuff they shouldn't and woke up a scary
thing.
And then they were saved at the last minute
by another scary thing that no one understood.
So now in Children of the Sky, the Tines'
world has gone through its, or started its
industrial revolution.
But yet the scary things are still out there.
Are we gonna have to wait another 20 years
to see what comes next?
>>Vernor: Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
[laughter]
>>Vernor: Certainly I think the most trenchant
criticism of The Children of the Sky is that
it doesn't bring completion.
Or, or, and arguably it doesn't bring enough
semi-completion.
And it seems to me that it would take at least
two novels to bring this thing in for a landing.
>>Male #8: [inaudible]
>>Vernor: Yeah, right.
I actually had a chat with him about that
once.
"Well, how long is it gonna be, Mr. Jordan?"
He was, a book, about book eight or book nine.
He says, "Oh, two more books.
Well, maybe three.
Four at the outside."
[laughter]
>>Male Presenter: Hey.
It's workin' OK for George.
With the Game of Thrones thing.
He's making a lot of money from it.
>>Vernor: So, have you read the Blabber?
>>Male #8: I hope to now.
>>Vernor: The Blabber, actually, I'm going
to try, I'm still going to try to fit the
trajectory so it will fit The Blabber.
'Cause The Blabber takes place thousands of
years later.
So I don't have an answer to your question.
I'm currently trying to figure out what my
next book is going to be.
>>Male #9: So, as an aside I find out that
I was extremely angry with you when I finished
this book.
So please make the next one be [inaudible]
[laughter]
Um, I'm going to annoy everybody else here,
has
>>Male Presenter: I'm holding you back from
attacking the
>>Male #9: I'm annoying everybody else here
by asking a fiction question instead of a
science question.
Which is in Fire in the Deep, in the no net
sequences in particular.
Which were fantastic.
You know you, what you're seeing there is
like some member of an alien race typing on
a keyboard and hitting send and so on.
But what it feels like and especially what
the labeling makes it looks like is that the
character is the race itself.
Like the race is an aggregate.
And this works really well in the story but
kind of the first logic breaks down.
Because I can imagine myself sitting at a
computer somewhere and flaming someone and
someone thinking I am humanity.
>>Vernor [inaudible]
>>Male #9: Yeah.
And it seems a little atypical.
Especially for you since as you pointed out
earlier you seem to have a very individualistic
idea of where things are going.
And anarchists where government doesn't represent
everything.
I was wondering if you could say anything
about the race and its characters.
>>Vernor: I think you're right about the tone
and the implication.
And at the time my excuse was, this is more
or less an internal excuse.
I tried to reflect this in facts that were
in the story.
Is that it was so expensive to get an interstellar
link.
That really only large institutions or, and
could afford to do it.
And so you would not see the sort of person
that you would sort of, sender that you would
see on a planetary, or a planetary system.
>>Male #9: So it's actually MIT community
that's sending these messages.
>>Vernor: At least, right.
Now the question then is, why is it so informal.
And I blame that on the, on the final step
of the interface software.
[laughter]
>>Male Presenter: Alright, so one last one.
We'll give you some closing comments and then
we can sign books and so on.
>>Male #10: So I think science fiction fans
in general and especially those who are also
computer scientists have a real interest in
what the idea of a communicating galactic
civilization looks like and what that network
looks like.
You talk a lot about, OK, how do you have
this system where the bandwidth is very low,
it, the bandwidth is very low, but so is the
latency.
So you can essentially like get around the
speed of light, but messages are very expensive
to send and slow to send.
I'm wondering if you thought about, OK, what
if, you know you thought about what if the
singularity doesn't happen.
But what if special relativity, there's no
cheats?
What if you know we are restricted to the
speed of light to send messages.
But on the other hand, the bandwidth can actually
be relatively large.
>>Vernor: Ah.
Right.
Right.
>>Male #10: Can there be a communicating galactic
civilization that way?
And have you thought about what that would
look like?
>>Vernor: Actually that was one thing that
I tried to look at some in A Deepness In the
Sky.
And in that situation I think I make a comment
that, what happens when it takes a century
to do a three-way handshake?
And
>>Male Presenter: Use EDP.
[laughter]
>>Vernor: It wouldn't be, well, yes.
But I think that this came after my teaching
times.
But you know Vince Surf's Interplanetary Oracle?
That would have made such a great project
in a network class.
Because nowadays when you, when a student
takes a network class, you have the, one of
the seven lay, the ISO layers.
It's given by God, and all the different design
decisions are written there in stone.
And if you are, if you're actually going to
be a protocol person, that, I think that's
a very bad and dangerous way to look at it.
Because you don't know what the axioms are.
You don't know what the assumptions were.
You don't know what the problems are that
are being solved.
There's just all these things you have to
do to make it work right.
The wonderful thing about Surf's, a wonderful
thing about Vint Cerf's interplanetary network
is that there were some really different ground
assumptions.
Now this isn't what you were talking about.
It's still within the solar system.
Latency and availability that made all sorts
of decisions work out differently.
And you essentially have to recapitulate the
sort of creativity that went into designing
the original NCP and TCP.
So, if you step that up to the interstellar
thing, where you're talking about years between,
that I think is still an open, not that I'm
predicting we're gonna get interstellar travel
in the next 30 years.
But I am.
[laughter]
But that would actually make a cool, a cool
sort of toy project for a course in protocol
design.
Because you would be forcing people to look
at things for, in a way that they haven't
had to look at things in, since 1960s.
>>Male Presenter: Now, is there anyone on
VC with a burning question?
No.
OK.
So, to close up, what's gonna be in A Fire
Upon The Children In The Deepness Of The Sky.
[laughter]
Since you do seem to try and mold words from
old book titles into the sentences of your
new book titles.
Or maybe your editors do.
What are you looking at for the future?
And then we'll get to signing and lunch.
>>Vernor: Charlie Stross, once had an interview
with Locus, where he was talking about the
singularity and his book, The Accelerando,
did what I never dared to do.
Which was to try to traipse through a singularity
scenario.
But he made the statement that I think he
said, I agree with these assertions that you
know we can't really know what it would be
like.
But then he said, you know, time passes.
And I'll bet you as we go through the next
10 or 15 years, not having gotten to the singularity,
that our understanding of what it would be
like will get to be better.
And actually I have some ideas for writing
a story that would be inside the singularity
and still with obviously with human sized
characters.
Partly because of what has happened in the
last 10 or 12 years.
And seeing how things are going.
I think there really are some novel things
that I could say.
So that's a chief competitor against immediately
doing another zone story.
>>Male Presenter: and the fans won't strangle
you.
So.
>>Vernor: I have to have, I have a hiding
place in the 20th century that I repair to.
>>Male Presenter: Excellent.
Well ,thanks very much for coming here, Vernor.
>>Vernor: Thank you.
[applause]
