Time & Perspective Quote by Vernor Vinge

Vinge’s move here is to quietly demote “intelligence” from a trait you possess to an effect you can rent. The sentence sounds like a calm observation, but it’s a Trojan horse: if intelligence can be “increased” by better access and better communication, then the boundary between human minds and the systems around them is already porous. We’re not waiting for a godlike AI to arrive; we’ve been stapling prosthetics onto cognition for decades.

The phrase “in some sense” is doing a lot of work. It’s a hedge, but also a lawyerly permission slip to count Google, libraries, peer review, translation, and networks as intelligence-adjacent. Vinge isn’t claiming your brain cells multiply when broadband speeds up. He’s arguing that what matters is capability: solving problems, coordinating action, compressing complexity into shareable chunks. That’s an operational definition of intelligence, tuned to a technologist’s worldview.

The subtext is classic Vinge-era singularity thinking: the “natural” mind is less an apex than a baseline platform. Each improvement in the information stack (storage, search, bandwidth, interfaces, social protocols) shifts the effective IQ of a civilization, even if no individual gets smarter. It also reframes fear. If “increases over natural intelligence” can be incremental and infrastructural, then the future won’t necessarily announce itself with a sentient machine. It will show up as a widening gap between those plugged into the cognitive exoskeleton and those left to think alone.