I haven’t read it myself but by pure luck I happened to read a piece by Henry Farrell today that had his take on the book:
These ideas were turned into novels by Vinge himself, including A Fire Upon the Deep (fun!) and Rainbow’s End (weak!). Other SF writers like Charles Stross wrote novels about humans doing their best to co-exist with “weakly godlike” machine intelligence (also fun!). Others who had no notable talent for writing, like the futurist Ray Kurzweil, tried to turn the Singularity into the foundation stone of a new account of human progress. I still possess a mostly-unread copy of Kurzweil’s mostly-unreadable magnum opus, The Singularity is Near, which was distributed en masse to bloggers like meself in an early 2000s marketing campaign. If I dug hard enough in my archives, I might even be able to find the message from a publicity flack expressing disappointment that I hadn’t written about the book after they sent it. All this speculation had a strong flavor of end-of-days. As the Scots science fiction writer, Ken MacLeod memorably put it, the Singularity was the “Rapture of the Nerds.” Ken, being the offspring of a Free Presbyterian preacher, knows a millenarian religion when he sees it: Kurzweil’s doorstopper should really have been titled The Singularity is Nigh.
Not having read the book myself, I can’t say if I agree with that or disagree. But there it is, for your consideration!
“I just don’t like anything which creates a lords and peasants kind of thing.”
Excellent. Then you’re the world’s greatest supporter of unions and would never allow a non-union shop situation, where the billionaire class can take advantage of workers completely unfettered and with no accountability.
You know, a “lords and peasants” kind of situation, where the lords have all the power and the peasants have none. That sure would be horrible. Glad we all agree on that.