

Rainbow's End -- a novel by Vernor Vinge that shows what is possible. Now go build it. - abcde
http://vrinimi.org/rainbowsend.html

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geuis
This is by far Vernor Vinge's worst novel. Its a weak story mostly about some
old people trying to keep the books in a library from being destroyed in an
effort to instantly digitize all of their information.

He wraps some near-future concepts into it, like mixed-reality games and such.
Otherwise it really does very little to explore the real concepts that we are
encountering now and in the next couple of decades leading to the singularity.

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skmurphy
I am not sure we read the same book. This was an outstanding look at the near
future. Three things off the top of my head that I took away as insightful:

1\. As computing gets cheaper and basic AI/pattern recognition follows suite,
the ability to get a group of human experts to collaborate becomes more
valuable. 2\. The "Rip Van Winkle" effect of an Alzheimer's patient waking up
after a cure is found and having to go back to high school (or what voc/tech
school has become) allowed for an interesting exploration of how little impact
computers have had to date on K-12 education and how much they are going to.
3\. The portrayal of the military as an enhanced system administration
function was interesting and matches what Barnett is proposing in "Pentagon's
New Map."

It's not the far future space opera of "Marooned in Real Time" or "A Fire Upon
the Deep"--both of which I also enjoyed--but it's about a lot more than "some
old people trying keep some books from being destroyed."

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geuis
But don't you see that this book was a very shallow? As a piece of work,
setting aside the pre-singularity tie-ins, the story was boring and the
characters were uninterresting. The technology aspects of the story did little
to actually explore near-term implementations of emerging tech in little more
than glossing ways. There was little original thought in this book and was
little more than VV's recent speeches of the last few years.

~~~
skmurphy
I re-read in the on-line version and was fascinated all the way through.
Perhaps you could offer some other books/stories to read that you found more
interesting or thought provoking.

