“These people in Rainbows End have the attention span of a butterfly,” he said. “They’ll alight on a topic, use it in a particular way and then they’re on to something else. Right now people worry that we don’t have lifetime employment anymore. How extreme could that get? I could imagine a world where everything is piecework and the piece duration is less than a minute.”
It’s an unsettling vision, but Vinge classifies it as one of the least unpleasant scenarios for the future: intelligence amplification, or I.A., in which humans get steadily smarter by pooling their knowledge with one another and with computers, possibly even wiring the machines directly into their brains. The alternative to I.A., he figures, could be the triumph of A.I. as artificial intelligence far surpasses the human variety. If that happens, Vinge says, the superintelligent machines will not content themselves with working for their human masters, nor will they remain securely confined in laboratories.

To avoid that scenario, Vinge has been urging his fellow humans to get smarter by collaborating with computers. At the conclusion of his novel, even the technophobic protagonist is in sync with his machines, and there are signs that the Singularity has arrived in the form of a superintelligent human-computer network. Or maybe not. Perhaps this new godlike intelligence mysteriously directing events is pure machine. Vinge has left it purposely ambiguous.
And what would happen to us if the machines rule? Well, Vinge said, it’s possible that artificial post-humans would use us the way we’ve used oxen and donkeys. But he preferred to hope they would want to protect weaker species.
_JOHN TIERNEY, NYT