What I thought was extremely interesting was the way the way the some focused were used... as components behaving as the intelligence behind computational tasks. The creator of Mechanical Turk undoubtedly read this book... I sure thought about creating something like that after I read it.
It's called adderall, I'm a fan.
Greg Egan has a similar concept ("neural mods") in his book Quarantine:
Re:A Deepness In The Sky
by bonafidehan on Wednesday February 02, 2011 @03:43PM
(#2172015)
The concept of focus was mesmerizing. It's well-accepted that our brains do amazing things under the covers, and the idea of bending our brains to a single focus speaks volumes about human intelligence and genius. Very evocative.
Vinge goes out of his way to show how it could be abused --- but I sometimes get the feeling that people crunching in early-startup mode would willingly use it, at least for a time, if they had it...