Vinge's most important prediction wasn't in Rainbows End, but in A Deepness in the Sky.
The novel (part of the Zones of Thought series tialaramex mentions) 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 star systems. Merchants 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>
I'm not surprised ChatGPT can answer it - I'm not sure why, but _Rainbows End_ is one of the most commonly-asked about SF books like that. Everyone remembers the book-tornado doing shotgun sequencing, but they can never remember its name or anything else that happens. I guess that's the problem with having a technology whose mental image is so compelling but also mostly disconnected to the rest of the book. (I know I can't tell you much about the rest without rereading the WP entry.)
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.
It's far future space opera science fiction.. but Vinge is an ex-Computer Science professor, and it shows the impact of security vulnerabilities. Wait until you read the bit about the guy who comes out of hibernation only to find these far-future space ships are running a variety of Unix, with a backdoor he wrote in hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Or if that's a bit much, Vinge's 1981 True Names[1] or 2007 Rainbow's End address the issues more directly.
I disagree with your characterization of Vinge's works as primarily about disasters but I agree they were all about an accelerating technological pace and its relation with intelligence.
I'm fairly certain the mysterious event in Marooned in Realtime was Ascension.
For Fire Upon Deep, it was sealed and there was a powerful countermeasure.
The rabbit of Rainbows End felt like a trickster to me. Child-like playfulness, fey-like chaotic neutral at worst. I do not interpret Rabbit's survival as hints of doom. The weapon was plain old human abuse of power for control.
Yeah there's been several scifi books written where the ease of access to things like diy-bio and manufacturing being miniaturized pose a huge threat by letting more and more people have access to the ability to make a new plague or bombs. Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge is one I'm fond of.
It features in some of Vinge's other works. I suppose particularly A Deepness in the Sky.
Alistair Reynolds Revelation Space novels riff on it quite a lot, to the point of several characters that exist more on the augmented side of the reality than in the real world.
I think Vernor Vinge has something like that in one of his end-of-civilization post-singularity novels, let's see... Marooned in Realtime, yes. (Great read, too.)
Vernor Vinge's stories have addressed a very similar idea. "A Deepness in the Sky" has significant interludes on this topic, though it's not the main focus of the work.
To be honest, that's precisely what had been on my mind.
Did you know Vinge is himself a computer scientist? IIRC, there's a point in A Deepness In The Sky where its implied that the protagonists' interstellar ramscoop ships run a descendant of Unix.
Has a Douglas Adams quality about it; if it's possible to write a book containing an infinite improbability drive, a restaurant at the end of the universe, and a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue, it's probably possible to write this.
This novel, and the prequel A Deepness in the Sky, depict 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.
<spoiler>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></spoiler>
People always talk about the future Usenet and such, but this is the most important single insight of Vinge in the two books.
"David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, that if successful, will make his career. [SPOILER: ELOPe is essentially Smart Compose in Gmail] But when the project is suddenly in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence.
David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers. But excitement turns to fear as the team realizes that they are being manipulated by an A.I. who is redirecting corporate funds, reassigning personnel and arming itself in pursuit of its own agenda."
"Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears" (3 part book series)
For a relevant sampling, the short story 'Synthetic Serendipity' is online at:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serend...
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