No one else has mentioned what I think are his two greatest insights besides the Singularity:
* A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.
The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
* In said future human society pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>
(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)
* A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.
The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
* In said future human society pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>
(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)