Author, Hugo-winner, professor, and pioneer writer on the subject of AI and the technological singularity, Vernor Vinge, is dead at 79 from Parkinson’s disease.

“When this [the creation of artificial intelligence that outstrips our own] happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.”
–Vinge, in OMNI