Perhaps the last great near-term predictor. I often wish he'd written more. To remind us all, he predicted shred and scan would be a short stop over done by villains on the way to nondestructive scanning.

That said, supporting Anna's archive is one of the best things you could do for humanity long term in my opinion.

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dwohnitmok an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Vinge also coined the term "the Singularity" (https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity) what he describes as "an opaque wall across the future" once superhuman artificial intelligence comes on the scene.

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orthoxerox 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Were they the villains? I remember the rogue three-letter-agency executive being the BBEG.

	▲	vessenes 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think some villainy is implied by "billionaire-backed-woodchipping of a library," but it's just my interpretation, no actual knowledge of Vinge's perspective.

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clickety_clack 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s digital though, so it requires the continued survival of readers for the data that is stored. The best thing you could for the long term is probably to buy a few hundred physical books to keep in a bookcase in your home.

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trollbridge 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Speaking as someone with dozens of bookshelves and tens of thousands of books... I kind of prefer the idea that continued survival means getting a bunch of 14TB drives and, you know, hosting certain files obtained from certain places. The reality is that most people's book collections are simply going into dumpsters, speaking as one of the people who go and try to buy these book collections at estate sales. (We can't do anything with the sheer volume of these books so most of them go into the dumpster. I cannot store hundreds of thousands of books, or millions, and no libraries want them.)

Also, holy cow, hard disks (as in the magnetic oxide kind) got a lot more expensive.

	▲	vessenes 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah agreed. I have on my long-term project list a hardware 'oracle' that would have everything and a local good model as a librarian/assistant and be solar powered in a pinch.