Gordon kicked things off with a quote post about an Anthropic wet lab in SF "I’m calling it. We’re basically living in the first chapter of Rainbows End" and continued:
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge has been a top recommendation of mine for people to read, to train themselves to think about what worlds we might end up in from today.
Specifically, I said - this book has been on my “read this if we’re going to work together / you can understand why I’m like this” for a decade now.
And: Hecho in Paraguay refers to computers made without backdoors. There are secure enclaves for every computing device (which is also clothing, and kind of just everywhere) ... which is also backdoored by a world government, and Paraguy makes home grown devices that don't have a backdoor, and hackers around the world have them.
At various companies over the last decade, I've made collections of articles and books and videos only partially jokingly referred to indoctrination files.
We often hand them to potential hires to give them a sense of what "makes" the company or project. And this book was on it for me1.
A decade because with Kharis & @depatchedmode.bsky.social we ran a small product studio focused on VR/AR and wearables. Rainbows End also features the endpoint of those systems. Yeah I guess this is a blog post I need to write…
The wearables are clothing and just sort of smart stuff everywhere.
There is ubiquitous AR/VR, and depending on permissions, you see or don't see different interactions.
The protagonist is from our time (the book was published in 2006), and is awakening from medical cryogenics to explore this new world, which means you discover it along with him.
So how far away are we from what is described in Rainbows End? Can you take some distance from it as fiction and think about what a 10 year arc looks like in various areas to get us to what is described?
And as Gordon says, how much of that is here today? Not only unevenly distributed, but jagged.