Dr Vernor Vinge isn't just a respected scientist, technologist, and academician.
Dr Vinge also writes science-fiction. He gets awards for it. Lots of awards. He also gets all sorts of awards in other fields as well.
One of his most entertaining -- and perhaps enlightening -- novels won multiple awards.
A Deepness in the Sky has some fascinating plot elements.
As Dr Vinge is a leading developer at the forefront of many convergences of science and society in the cutting edge of information systems and biology -- he's best known for his creation of the concept and term of the Singularity, also referred to as "the technological singularity".
To summarize briefly, the technological singularity occurs when artificial intelligence is developed which is at least weakly superhuman, and begins generating products, systems, technologies, concepts, and activity which surpass those within the capabilities of unaltered human beings. What will happen to humans -- and to human society -- is debatable. Some characterize the results of the application of superhuman technology to human beings as being Post-Human, Trans-Human, or even Super-Human.
In any case, it's not controversial anymore among the techological intelligentsia that the Singularity is Near. We in the technical fields believe that it is, absent active restraint, inevitable.
Some people believe that it's already begun, that we are in the process, and that it's not happening so much by design, as by accident; and, that even without the hypothetical influence of weakly superhuman artificial intelligences rapidly engineering themselves into deeply superhuman intelligences motivated mostly by a desire to enhance their own capacities, it's bound to happen.
The simple advance of human technology and the unintended consequences of unintended uses of that technology will hasten the day.
Back when I was a lowly clerk and technician at the Federal Communications Commission, helping to process applications for the Rural Cellular and Text Pager services in the Land Mobile, Common-Carrier division, we mostly thought that we'd be making it possible for stranded hikers to call for rescue with their cellphones, no matter how deep in the canyons of the Rocky Mountains they might be. We envisioned rapid rescue response directed to specific locations, and so-forth.
We also thought that ubiquitous access to text-message pagers would be helpful, and generally "in the public interest".
Everything at the FCC is driven by that phrase "in the public interest". We were tasked by our charter to utilize the electromagnetic spectrum in the public interest, and it is a fact that if the FCC heard about utilization of the electromagnetic spectrum in ways that were not in the public interest, the FCC would go to extremes to end it, with measures ranging from sending in agents -- we were a division of the Department of the Treasury, which also is the parent organization of the Secret Service -- to levying fines against "pirate radio" stations of as much as a quarter-million dollars per day.
Nobody at the FCC, in the late 1980s, ever thought that the ultimate result of our development and deployment of ubiquitous cellular and text-message service would be Smart Mobs, or the peoplesdirt.com slander and defamation website primarily accessed by Montgomery County MD teenagers via texting cellphone, nor did we much ever think that one of the most penalizable crimes in 2009 would be that of teenagers creating and distributing child pornography to other children through the epidemic act of "Sexting" While Driving.
We certainly never expected that Sexting would emerge as both motivation and payment for Smart Mobs, organized through the private message features at peoplesdirt.com.
And people out there actually still deny that the Singularity Is Near.
Probably it's the same people who deny Global Climate Change.
Dr Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky had a really scary -- genuinely terrifying -- plot element.
In this novel, a certain human colony had been infested with a virus or fungus (or an organism somewhere between both) that infected the nervous system. It was, in the story, called "the mindrot". From the Wikipedia article:
[...] The mindrot virus originally manifested itself on the Emergents' home world as a devastating plague, but they subsequently mastered it and learned to use it both as a weapon and as a tool for mental domination. Emergent culture uses mindrot primarily in the form of a variant which technicians can manipulate in order to release neurotoxins to specific parts of the brain. An active MRI-type device triggers changes through dia- and paramagnetic biological molecules. By manipulating the brain in this way, Emergent managers induce a state they call Focus, in which Focused persons become completely obsessed with a single idea or specialty, essentially turning them into brilliant appliances. Many Qeng Ho become Focused against their will [...]
"Brilliant appliances"?
Actually, in the novel, none of them exactly volunteer. The "Emergents" -- those from that doomed colony world -- deliberately infect the Qeng Ho ("Treasure Fleet") interstellar trader party as a ploy to gain control of the extremely advanced and numerically superior Qeng Ho expedition to an interesting and potentially exploitable planetary system.
Rockville, Maryland, is the site of a massive industry doing cutting edge research in biology and biotechnology. If the Singularity Is Near, there's an exceptionally good chance that when it erupts, it will erupt in Rockville, in Bethesda at NIH, or in the string of research facilities strung along I-270.
Most research is governed by the regulations to be found at the US Office of Government Ethics. Although many people, after long years of the Bush II Administration, may have come to regard "government ethics" as an oxymoronic phrase, the fact is, those ethics are there and legitimate researchers can get in exceptional trouble by violating those ethics.
But considering that such games as industrial espionage -- concerned with being the first to the patent-office, or to market -- are very high-stakes, especially with biotechnology and pharmacology, you can't expect all that much in terms of ethics.
History tells us that misguided individuals, and misguided organizations as small as clinics and as large as nations, are perfectly willing to engage in vivisection.
If people are willing to do that, why stop at doing illegal trials of experimental pharmacological drugs on human subjects, or for that matter, why stop at doing illegal trials of drugs in novel applications?
It certainly never stopped the CIA...
And it never stopped anyone else's intelligence community, or transnational organized crime, either.
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