Rather than writing about the actual plot, I’ll be focusing on the major technologies and salient features of the world that Vinge has built, in addition to some quick thoughts on the prominence of those themes in 2024.
In this section I’ll steel-man Vinge’s main arguments, at least what I inferred as his arguments from the novel. I will include my thoughts on whether he is in fact on to something in the next section.
The rise of the generalist
“Maybe you can,” said Robert, a little bit proud of how level his voice sounded. “I checked your creditats. You don’t seem to know anything about anything, but you have this knack for bringing the right people together and being around when those people solve serious problems.” The Stranger waved his hand dismissively. “I don’t know anything about anything? You are naive, Professor. Our world is overflowing with technical expertise. Knowledge is piled metaphorical light-years deep. Given that, the truly golden skill is the one I possess—to bring together the knowledge and abilities that make solutions. Your Ms. Chumlig understands that. Schoolkids certainly understand. Even Tommie Parker understands, though he has one important detail backwards. In me,” another elaborate gesture, his hand flattening against his turtleneck shirt, “in me, you have the far extreme of this ability. I am world-class at ‘bringing-together-to-get-answers.’”
To me, Vinge describes a world where knowledge and creativity are completely liberated; the best incarnation of the Internet/World Wide Web. Knowledge silos at all scales of organization, from research organizations to individual experts, have adopted an “open-source” mindset where practically anyone in the world can easily find the actual problems on the frontier and contribute. In this utopia[[#^dba2c9 | [1]]] , there is a ubiquitous marketplace for ideas, answers, and solutions. Companies and countries have realized that truly public collaboration is actually very advantageous for solving problems (I don’t think this would exist without a really good incentive structure, perhaps blockchain or prediction markets or marketplaces for coming up with ideas??) and that having access to literally anyone on Earth and making them compete for coming up with meaningful answers/questions/solutions is super good for productivity and profit.
From my reading of the book, Search is also much more optimized for problem-solving than it currently is on the Internet. Search is optimized for one question “How?” instead of “What?” like it is today. I think that the Internet nowadays is wonderful for giving individuals an abundance of “What” information that, in theory, allows anyone to grok anything given infinite time and resources; but we don’t live forever and there are 24 hours in a day. Vinge argues, in my view, that in this world of an abundance of “practical knowledge”, the scarce resource will be integration; so generalists, people with vision and just-enough-knowledge-to-be-dangerous across a broad number of disciplines are highly valued.
Personal Riffs
Are LLMs a possible solution to creating Search Engine that is optimized for answering the “How?” questions? I think they are part of the answer, but there needs to be a marketplace of ideas, if that even is possible, incentivizing public goods is hard. I also believe that most of the important information is in people’s heads and not easily digitized?
Notes
[1] this age of creativity and abundance leads to the effort needed to destroy the world to plummet.
Nowaday’s Grand Terror technology was so cheap that cults and small criminal gangs could acquire it… In all innocence, the marvelous creativity of humankind continued to generate unintended consequences. There were a dozen research trends that could ultimately put world-killer weapons into the hands of anyone having a bad hair day.