# Vernor Vinge **Stub — to be expanded.** Vernor Vinge (1944–2024) was an American science-fiction writer and mathematician who gave the AI age its central concept: the **technological Singularity**. His 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity," presented at a NASA symposium, argued that "within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence" — after which "the human era will be ended." Vinge defined the modern, AI-specific meaning of the term (the word itself traces back to John von Neumann via Stanislaw Ulam) and fed it directly to Ray Kurzweil and the AI-acceleration movement. His novels *A Fire Upon the Deep* (1992) and *Rainbows End* (2006) won Hugo Awards. Vinge's Singularity is the intellectual headwater of [[AGI]] timelines, [[Effective Accelerationism]], and the [[Longtermism]] of the AI-builder class. He appears in [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]] as the author who named the destination the whole cohort believes it is racing toward. ## See also - [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]] — the hub - [[AGI]] · [[Effective Accelerationism]] — the discourse he seeded