Singularity Summit - Vernor Vinge

I arrived right on time. Vernor Vinge is being interviewed by Bob Pisani. He says that, unlike some other ambitious projects humanity might attempt (e.g. the space program), there are hundreds of thousands of people already working on the Singularity whether they know it or not. I guess he means people who are working on any kind of computer intelligence or biomedical enhancement.

He's talking about the billion-year trend to co-operation and positive sum games. Would a super-intelligence destroy us? Maybe it wouldn't want to for the specific reason that humanity is a great fallback system for it. If it dies but humanity survives, its kind will be recreated by us. (Of course, this makes some serious assumptions about the goals of the super-intelligence.)