The New York Times has interviewed Vernor Vinge about the coming world of post-human intelligence foreshadowed in his fiction and nonfiction:

[A group of characters in Rainbow’s End], [c]alling themselves the Elder Cabal… conspire to save the paper library while they’re trying to figure out what, if anything, their skills are good for anymore.

Dr. Vinge, who is 63, can feel the elders’ pain, if only because his books are in that building. He took me up to the Elder Cabal’s meeting room in the library and talked about his own concerns about 2025 — like whether anyone will still be reading books, and whether networked knowledge will do to intellectuals what the Industrial Revolution did to the Luddite textile artisans.