A month ago I hosted Vernor Vinge for a Bay Area trip. This included my interview with Vinge at Google on his career and also a special talk that evening at Singularity University. In the 1980s, Vinge coined the term "the singularity" even though Ray Kurzweil has become the more public face of the concept of late.

He did not disappoint with an interesting talk on what he called "group minds." He does not refer to the literal group minds that his characters known as the Tines have in his Zone novels, but rather all the various technologies that are allowing ordinary humans to collaborate in new ways that allow problems to be solved at a speed and scale not seen before. In puzzling over the various paths to the singularity -- which means to him the arrival of an intelligence beyond our own -- he and others have mostly put the focus on the creation of AI at human level and beyond. He points out that tools which use elements of AI to combine human thinking may generate a path to the singularity that is more probably benign.

In the talk he outlines a taxonomy of group minds, different ways in which they might form and exist, to help understand the space.

Vernor returns to Singularity University tomorrow night, Aug 1, to participate in the Milton Friedman Centennial party. You can attend this for free or get details on Facebook

There is also a short video interview with Vinge after this talk describing the main talk. Both videos are available in HD.