Accelerando has prophecies that are coming true and it's scary. Spoiler warning in case you want to read it.
The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here
He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's basically no longer functional, unable to do anything for himself, doesn't know where he is or why he's there. In a way, he lost his own agency. -> this is now called skills atrophy and I'm sure it'll become a much bigger issue within the next 10 years.
Corporations are almost entirely run by AI agents, when they sue each other they use AI lawyers and verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds so they're basically constantly suing each other many times a second in an attempt to overwhelm each other's compute resources. -> this looks on track to happen
The entire solar system is on its way to ultimately turn into AI corporations "optimizing" for profit competing with other corporations to exhaust every little resource left in the entire system. Even after humanity itself is gone, all that's left is FAANG-like corporations competing for profit for eternity. And in the book, they find another intelligent species that succumbed to the same fate. This might just be that great filter everyone is theorizing. -> bleak and scary plausible outcome for what we're going through now.
(if I got some things wrong, I'm writing from memory. It's been years since I read this book)
This is nothing new though; industrialization and specialization have already caused basic survival skills to atrophy in most of the population. Take the case of a massive EMP taking out all computer systems. Gaps in supply chains and power failures would lead to millions (or billions) dying of starvation, dehydration, or exposure because they don’t know how to provide for themselves. People who’ve studied and practiced survival skills (or who retained that knowledge in physical media like a book) would survive. Drop someone from humanity’s hunter-gatherer days into the same situation and they’d have a better chance of surviving than most contemporary humans.
If everyone in Manhattan had Bear Grylls-level survival skills, most would still starve in the long term without modern supply chains and industrial agriculture. The damaged ecosystems around large population centers can't support millions of primates, however skilled, suddenly relying on it.
Same would be true if you dropped off a million wild black bears in their natural habitat. The natural environment just can't support that many large animals in a small area.
Its irrelevant if you can provide for yourself. The ecosystem cannot support 9 billion Hunter gatherers - period. Subsistence level agriculture is also wildly inefficient and so again: the ecosystem cannot support it.
A hunter-gatherer dropped into a metropolis where all the logistics has suddenly failed would be as dead as everybody else.
> Its irrelevant if you can provide for yourself. The ecosystem cannot support 9 billion Hunter gatherers - period.
I didn’t suggest that it could, but the number that it can support is certainly more than zero. If that’s the only choice in a hypothetical scenario where global infrastructure goes kablooey, then people who can figure out how to provide for themselves will outlive those who can’t. From there it’s natural selection.
Aside: That was my favorite section of the book as well. Just the notion that a person could have had so much of "themselves" embedded in their agents that when disconnected from them they are basically in shock.
I remember at the time I was noticing how all my friends were completely loosing the ability to use paper maps. And there was a big discussion among us about whether needing to physically rotate the map in order to make sense of it was an example of us loosing spatial reasoning. It reminded me of how little I understood the actual space (landmarks, distance, etc) from A to B until I started driving myself at 16. Previous to that, your parents drove you, and it just seem like two places were magically connected by a wormhole. Anyway, we thought it was interesting that we might be the last generation to have used actual written maps to navigate to places. We had learned to do so, but we would also loose the ability with time.
Sure enough, these days, I have a hard time imagining using a map compared to just having maps route the path on my phone. The skill has atrophied from disuse. I imagine this is what "loosing your agents" felt like to that character.
> Malice – revenge for waking him up – sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!” He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him.
Even more fitting is the part of the story where a collective of uploaded lobster minds are involved. I wonder if that was an inspiration for the "OpenClaw" name somehow or just pure coincidence.
I would feel the same about anyone working in augmented/virtual reality who hadn't read "Rainbows End" or watched any number of XR-focused anime.
What do you mean, you can't come up with anything to do with these devices? What do you mean, you're hiring webdevs to make another Snap filter? If you're on the cutting edge, I would expect that your knowledge base includes niche, related texts.
It was a pretty prominent work of the singularity subgenre. At least I remember it being the first one featured in this Popular Science article about the future of science fiction:
One of the robots ("moravecs" (amazing)) in Dan Simmons' Ilium was also crustacean formed: Orphu of Io (and his friend Mahnmut. Beat Charles to that particular weird coincidence-to-be by plus or minus a year!
It's not quite as memorable or as strong a theme as Accelerando laid down. But still quite a serendipity, imo.
> He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's basically no longer functional,
Is this new? I don't think I could function without everything that was available in the 1950. I live because I have access to electricity, super markets, running water, working sewage, etc.. Take them away and I would not be able to fend for myself, especially in any major city. Put me in a forest I don't know how to build shelter, what things I can eat, how to catch stuff, make tools, etc...
At the time I read the story, Economics 2.0 and its effect on humans that installed the upgrade paralleled with some stuff I had read about sociopathic behavior. Stross later wrote about the same ideas in Rule 34.
>WASHINGTON, May 12 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence company Anthropic on Tuesday released an expanded suite of features for lawyers using its Claude AI assistant, including tools for specialized legal topics and access within Claude to other legal research and AI products.
Not lawyers-- judges. Judges, in my experience, don't take kindly to anything or anyone infringing on their power.
Edit: I've met a ton of attorneys who are bullish on LLMs preparing work for them (kinda like robo-paralegals, albeit ones apt to spout bullshit). Judges, being human (and lazy by dint of evolution), would probably lean on LLM-based analysis too. I cannot imagine they'd ever stand by and let decisions be made by a non-judge.
In fact, I'll bet someone makes a bundle selling AI arbitration services that do just that. Got a beef with BigCo? What could be more fair than letting HAL settle the matter?
If I had the sense God gave a gerbil, I'd already have Claude writing up a patent application on this. (Edit, too late: https://www.adr.org/ai-arbitrator/ )
If there were a particular subset of people that were the absolute least likely to ever revolt against anything it could be no one other than the lawyers. They've trained their entire careers to play by rules so esoteric that people like us need to hire them just to interact with those rules safely.
It always bothers me when people suggest that AI could be the "great filter" in the sense of Fermi's paradox. Yes, AI may well wipe out biological life, but all evidence suggests AI will have a much easier time with space travel compared to biological life, and it will emit much louder signals unless it is intentionally staying silent.
> let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here
If you squint really hard, arguably maybe sort of in the future perhaps.
Openclaw seems to mostly end in dead end (but interesting) experiments and/or people losing weeks of work. That’s like saying “hoverboards” are basically flying cars.
I was turned on to this book by an HN commenter a few months ago. Since then, it’s become something between a goal and a fear that one day I’ll get to the point where I wonder how much of my consciousness is me versus how much has been pushed off to my agent.
It’s already a lot closer than I expected to ever experience.
I never really fell into that, but obviously saw it around me. Phones are fine for content consumption, but not adequate for creation.
AI lets me spend a few seconds to get a thought out of my head, then I can come back to it later and not have to go down the rabbit hole investigating it.
The "products" are only produced because those who have money want those things. When 10 trillionaires own everything, then whatever they want made is what corporations will make.
They are not necessarily lacking imagination, they are just not providing answers to their own question. Almost everyone has read some dystopian SciFi.
> Corporations are almost entirely run by AI agents, when they sue each other they use AI lawyers and verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds so they're basically constantly suing each other many times a second in an attempt to overwhelm each other's compute resources. -> this looks on track to happen
Woah, sounds dystopian, what gives you the impression that this is on track to happen, is there "AI lawyers" already, or what's going on?
The few times I've read about AI/LLMs being used by lawyers or others in relation to law, it's always about "Someone tried to use AI, AI hallucinated and now the lawyer lost his license" which sounds proper and the "right way" to me.
A few current situations that are leaning this way in theme:
- ai facial recognition used by police, detaining innocent people with no recourse or consequences
- ai military decisions made without human in the loop. Double points for the decisions being to kill someone. Anthropic insisting a human should be in the loop for killing decisions is what caused Trump to declare them a supply chain risk.
- ai denial of insurance claims without a doctor in the loop
- ai "plagiarism" detection in college courses failing students
- that one colleague everyone has who throws slop over the wall and just sends any feedback directly to the ai
The thing you mentioned, human judges and harsh penalties for unsupervised ai lawyering, is trying to hold this kind of nightmare back. It will be very hard (and only get harder) for humans to fight through the deluge of slop, especially if the slop is weaponized as a kind of DoS like in the book. I don't expect laws are strong enough to hold this back but I don't know any other tool in our collective toolboxes.
> It will be very hard (and only get harder) for humans to fight through the deluge of slop, especially if the slop is weaponized as a kind of DoS like in the book. I don't expect laws are strong enough to hold this back but I don't know any other tool in our collective toolboxes.
We don't need to fret about finding a technical solution to slop in the real world. Courts have a mechanism to fight this kind of thing (overwhelming the court/defendant) already: vexatious/frivolous litigant designations, sanctions, and anti-SLAPP-esque statutes.
Yeah, I don't see that one. I don't see the legal system, the one that has people with guns to back it, giving up authority to an AI or a group of AIs.
A couple of years ago, Steam made everyone accept a new ToS that required going through courts for disputes rather than arbitration. This was because some lawyers had realized that they could zerg rush arbitration with claims that Valve was obligated to deal with individually, and pay the fees to do so (IIRC). This effectively meant that the lawyers could extract settlements from Valve, because the alternative was massive losses from those arbitration fees, whether or not the claims had merit.
All this to say that there's a weakness in arbitration agreements as they currently exist which means that companies incur a cost when forcing consumers to use arbitration (as they should). Waiting for the first company to be instantly bankrupted by some event related to this.
The one thing that's often missing in fictions about the future is how half-arsed everything is. Seen how buggy, insecure and just plain wrong so many of the things we are using are, we kinda already live in a world where everything works but only half-works.
We're much close to a dystopian comedy like Brazil than we are to Black Mirror.
I have a very vague memory of reading chunks of this on Slashdot comments over months or years. I'm not 100% sure of this though. The 2000s are a little bit hazy (uni, work, life). Did this actually happen?
> Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"
> "Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."
No, I wrote that in 1998. It was published as the novelette "Lobsters" in Asimov's SF Magazine in 2002, made the Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 2003 (it didn't win), and later became the opening of the novel published in 2005.
I emphasized: the direction things were going in was obvious in the late 90s.
And don't *ever* let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.
Yes, it was obvious maybe even in the 60s for a few, and it has been fantasized by many, but you wrote it as a cohesive, nearly deterministic, and fluid story. Your deep understanding of some fundamental issues (like latency) that you turned into consequences instead of brushing them off is what made it so perfect as a very tangible and possible future. One read and it never left me
I would take this opportunity to chastise you for merely the Wikipedia article for Accelerando tripping my chronophobia/technophobia and giving me an existential crisis, but if I'm being honest, IHNMAIMS, Battle Angel Alita, Space, Inc., and BattleTanx got to me first.
This was a genetically modified space lobster talking to Mangred, right? I haven't verified but I've been assuming that the lobster mascot for OpenClaw was a reference to Accelerando.
Not an actual meatspace genetically modified space lobster, it was a neural network based on genetically modified lobsters uploaded to spacecraft that had achieved sentience and autonomy after it hacked its self-modification prevention code.
If OpenClaw was an Accelerando reference that's an incredibly deep cut and super cool imo
The first three shorts, when initialy published, had a real "15 minutes into the future" vibe. Substantial ideas thrown away as quick asides gave it that "acceleration" vibe - a society with its finger mashed on the fast forward button. William Gibson is positively static by comparison.
Some of those throwaway ideas seem quaint now (there's some stuff about body modems I think?), but one of the interesting things about the book, to me, is the further away from "the present" it gets, the more like traditional SF it becomes: it slows down, gets more spaceopera-y. But those first three shorts were something special, and for me might be the best thing cstross has ever done. Right place right time I guess, like that album you first heard when you were fourteen.
Accelerando and The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (and that series as a whole) are the best examples of how weird the future is going to get I’ve read.
Other series like The Culture are amazing too, but the aforementioned feel possible in a way that others don’t. For me, I can see the causal chains leading from here to there vividly in a way that you don’t get with a lot of other sci-fi.
That combination of plausible weirdness is unique and I’d highly recommend The Quantum Thief to anyone who enjoyed Accelerando or Stross’ other writing.
I'm reading Accelerando at the moment and I kept thinking about The Quantum Thief. I enjoyed the Quantum Thief more, but Accelerando feels more relevant to the current times.
Sub in the vampires for equally cold androids from the alien series and you've got it made. We're on the cusp of viscerally exploring blindsight's central theme of what does it look like to have intelligence without sentience.
Ever been stuck in a waiting room listening to the most boring conversation about someone else's melodrama? You don't want to listen to it but you also can't tune it out, and you need to wait and listen for when they call your number...
Appreciate the recommendation for the quantum thief. I really enjoyed accelerando which was a recommendation from a friend so I look forward to checking this one out. If it's good I'll share it with the same friend who taught me about accelerando.
Not the first time I've come across great recommendations in the comments of HN!
One of my favorite books but it wasn't until I came back to read it 15-20 years later that I realized the whole thing is a tragedy. As a younger man I was high on the futurism. As an older man it's evident that in Stross' telling much of the important parts of humanity are eventually washed away by keeping up with technological advances. It's beautiful but sad.
Have posted this elsewhere: Accelerando has always been a favorite SciFi novel of mine but it hits very different today. As the name suggests, it’s about how the world evolves when accelerated by powerful AI technology. Notably it was written circa 2005, long before this GenAI era.
Even though it focuses primarily on the human agents in the story -- where the definition of humanity itself is fuzzy from the get-go -- it is set against a background of a vast, inscrutable, semi-virtual universe populated entirely by powerful artificial intelligences interacting amongst themselves, pursuing obscure goals that are largely beyond the grasp of mere humans.
And they're busy running their own economy where they wheel and deal to trade the commodity most precious of all to them: Energy! Sound familiar? ;-)
But it starts from a point that feels very real today. In the very first chapter, the protagonist forks a part of his own presumably cybernetic intellect to autonomously perform investigations in the background and report back to him.
That was an extremely cool but a very far-off, not-in-my-lifetime Sci-Fi fantasy idea when I read it.
But today I’ve already had Gemini Deep Research write investigative reports previously unfeasible for me due to time and expertise constraints, such as the possible timeline for robotics replacing all physical human labor given real world constraints: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LiahX2deGBoAb7kqIi5zNZm0... (spoiler alert, not for a long time yet due to extremely limited critical supply chain constraints.)
When I read that report, I realized we had quantum-leaped from Sci-Fi to reality in just a few years.
As such, beyond an engaging, if slightly disjointed, narrative arc, Accelerando gives you a framework to analyze current events and where they may lead.
Do I remember correctly that one of the major characters in what we would now call an influencer with always-on video glasses? I think his spectacles get slashdotted at one point.
I’m not sure which is the greater anachronism got me. That I didn’t find the idea of endless surveillance creep glasses bothersome at the time I read the book or that slashdotting is in itself a once current, now newly archaic term.
The difference between Manfred and the influencers we have now was that he actually invented things, built things, and brokered huge deals while streaming everything.
Mostly just invented things, patented them, then brokered the deal, often donating the patents to the Open Patent Foundation in the process so that nobody could monopolize the idea in the medium term. For example, he patented the idea of using uploaded gastropod neural nets to run a nanotech factory on an asteroid, then hired the uploaded gastropods themselves as part of the deal (they wanted to “swim away” from the noisy and dangerous and inexplicable humans).
As a result of hundreds of these types of deals he no longer ever uses money. When he orders a drink in a bar someone who made it big off of one of his ideas picks up the tab. When he travels an airline gifts him the tickets. When he wants to buy lingerie for his girlfriend, he finds that every lingerie shop on the planet is willing to give him free products because he once testified as an expert witness against an obscenity charge in a trial of a pornographer or something. His girlfriend, meanwhile, works for the IRS and is chasing him to try to force him to pay millions in taxes on the vast income that the IRS is sure he is hiding.
A pretty funny story, actually, and the way he eventually gets the IRS off of his back is hilarious.
Does he invent things though? Probably more brokering than inventing, and as the "idea guy", whatever he does come up with he doesn't need to build because the world is so overflowing with AI and 3d printers elsewhere. With no need to build, does he spend time on design then? We can imagine, but IIRC, it's not shown, and mostly it is enough to just have an idea.
Manfred's a smart guy and a worthy hero, but I think we see this mostly from his keen sense of what is ethical. Besides that.. we're lionizing an entrepreneur and a influence broker who suggests we should synergize our way to post-scarcity, which always works for him mostly because he's already there. As he's up against against a lot of backwards-looking people, he looks like a prophet. Maybe lots of people in the general public could do what he does, but don't have the wealth or influence to pull it off?
I forget what Stross has to say about it, but maybe this tension is why he's not a fan of the book. Sure, everyone wants to be an influence broker, but they were never very heroic and often are villains. Since the early 2000s entrepreneurs have lost a lot of ground in the eyes of the public in that they are not seen as visionary, just normal people with extraordinary access.
I've seen him comment on it a few times over the years, though I wouldn't take my vague memories on them as canonical: He's mainly pissed off that many avid fans of some of his books and Accelerando in particular show a few patterns of thinking: 1) They miss his intent to show future for humanity that was much more of a "Warning! Do Not Enter!" than as any sort of advocacy/enthusiasm for it 2) Really pissed off that a subset of the that are ultra ultra wealthy either miss the signpost or dont care and seem to take it & other hard-takeoff singularity stories as potential maps & guidebooks on the path 3) He's annoyed (maybe not the right word) that a significant portion of people that cheer on the idea of a singularity do so in part for the hope of something like immortality, biological or uploads, specifically in a way that reinvents quite a bit of the trappings and mythos and other cultural baggage embodied in a lot of western Christianity, most notably a lot of the TESCREAL hodge podge of groups.
Again, all of this is my own dodgy recollections and paraphrases.
> With no need to build, does he spend time on design then?
He's a cyborg: "the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power running the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses." Why he is special? Who knows. Maybe he has a talent of interfacing with the nets through the crude hardware of the era. Maybe it's connections you mention.
Tragically unexamined, also, is that the push for surveillance of late is almost certainly a reaction to the reverse-surveillance consumer networked tech - and, specifically, connected camera-enabled smartphones and the networks/software needed to instantly share what's being recorded - enabled, flipping the asymmetry of the then-extant surveillance state in the early-mid 2010s. A lot of powerful people really, really hated that Rodney King and its attendant embarrassment to law enforcement was becoming a monthly occurrence. Humiliation is what moves power, after all.
Anyone have recommendations on books that can rival the first part of Accelerando in number of prescient ideas about how the near future, pre singularity might look?
My own list is:
Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon
Counting Heads by David Marusek
Nexus by Ramez Naam
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
But I'm always on the look out for more! The more predictive the better!
Not quite what you’re requesting but “Across Realtime” by Vernor Vinge explores ideas around the singularity. In particular it contains the short novel “Marooned in Realtime” that is completely mind blowing imo.
The edition of Marooned in Realtime I read in the late eighties or around 1990 was my introduction to the concept of the Singularity, and it had an essay in the back of it by Vinge asserting that the reader would likely live to see the real thing within 30 years or so.
It's remarkable that so many of that circle in the 80s and 90s were so close, even without knowing exactly what detailed technologies would enable it. Trend lines on graphs undefeated, I guess.
Toss "Signal to Noise" and "A Signal Shattered" both by Eric S. Nylund into the pot - interesting conceptual things around biotech/selfmodification singularities in addition to the more common computational singularities.
Rampant consumerism, a United States so dominated by corporations that there is a senator from Cocoa-Cola, and advertising so aggressive you might even prefer the world we live in... published in 1953.
Pantheon/the stories it's based on by Ken Liu (though I really do recommend the animated series).
Maybe more conventional/dated, but I always recommend it for "getting" the emotional, person-to-person side in a particular way that few others do: .hack//SIGN. None of the characters ever quite realize what's going on, but elements - especially the soundtrack - seem to understand that everyone is on the precipice of something irrevocable.
Shine, bright morning light
Now in the air the spring is coming
Sweet blowing wind
Singing down the hills and valleys
Keep your eyes on me
Now we're on the edge of hell
Dear my love, sweet morning light
Wait for me, you've gone much farther, too far...
Not a book, but the new Marathon computer game might be the first non-indie title where you play as a disembodied posthuman entity. Very neat and unconventional aesthetic for a sci-fi future, too.
Lovestar by Andri Snaer Magnason (2012) is a good story around ubiquitous advertising, remote work, and veneration of Tech Bros and tech in everyday life gone too far.
For one example, if people are in debt, a debt collector is allowed to force their brain implants to take over their body at random to shout advertising jingles at strangers, to pay off the debt with advertising money.
Oh, cool, I didn't finish it at the time I first read it, linked from HN.
But it did seem pretty well-written, the human relationships portrayed (divorced/separated main character iirc?) appeared a bit off to me, but much less than in many, many other SF stories.
Reminded me of a hybrid between Philip K. Dick and some other, more "conventional", SF authors such as Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov.
"After a trillion dollars of investment, we have successfully built the Vile Offspring from Stross's famous 2005 SF-horror "Don't build the Vile Offspring"".
I've read a number of the comments here about Accelerando and other books of the same ilk. I'm thinking a couple of things, a question and the feeling:
What SciFi books are describing what is now thought to be impossibilities all together in spite of the potentials of singularity?
I feel like everyday there are new, very real discoveries in science as a result of AI and otherwise that reading about that stuff is just as good as reading about any possibilities that may be described in any science fiction book.
We are living in or moving very quickly towards an era where everything around us seems quite fantastical compared to the life I lived some 50 years ago.
I love this book! The part about the implication of digitized minds and long distance space travel was really eye-opening. It really makes you understand that, no, aliens are not visiting earth.
The entire thing is an amazing exploration of how the concept of time becomes a bit meaningless though with those capabilities: traveling at relativistic velocities for hundreds of years? Several of your backups live out whole lives and also a centuries old lawsuit is still in progress and a lawyer is slowly uploading on your laser propulsion source to talk about it. When you get back everyone will still be around because it's also surprisingly hard to actually die anymore.
I read this book a few years ago and it was just chock full of interesting ideas. I think I didn't really "get" it, or enjoy the story that much but I definitely was impressed by the imagination. Every once in a while I think of random things in it. IIRC, it was this book where corporations become kind of important, central entities at some point, and that resonates more and more these days.
Vernor Vinge has some hits and some misses, but A Deepness in the Sky (best to just take the plunge and read it without googling — it's good either way, but better if you don't even read the back of the paperback).
Then, a bit further afield but for me, at least, exercised what I liked in The Culture series, even though stylistically different: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.
I think A Fire Upon the Deep would be a more enjoyable starting place for someone that likes the Culture series, even though A Deepness in the Sky is generally considered the better novel.
Charles Stross' various SF, especially the space opera-adjacent stuff. (He has an large range. Merchant Princes and Laundry series are good, but not at all along the lines of Banks.)
Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Saga.
Vernor Vinge's three Zones of Though books.
David Brin's Uplift series.
Perhaps Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series.
Max Gladstone's Emperess of Forever shares a similar setting, but is much lighter.
The writing of Gene Wolfe and Tamayn Muir has, I think, much in common with Banks in terms of depth and character, but even though SF they have a very different feel and focus to their works.
And, of course, if you want the original space opera, it might be worth tracking down E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen books. Galactic Patrol and Grey Lensman are the heart of it and ought to be read first. Second Stage Lensman and Children of the Lens are worthy sequels that complete the story. They're pretty breezy reads and very different from Banks in everything but the setting of a galaxy filled with different species, and likely seem somewhat hackneyed now, but they're also the source of most space opera archetypes. (If you think of a space opera trope, it probably came from Lensman. Star Wars is largely a Lensman/Flash Gordon mashup.)
The Merchant Princes series is fun, and I really enjoy the story of why he wrote it. It starts out as fantasy for basically the whole first novel and then some. But you can find some evidence from the start that it's really sci-fi, and by the end of the series it has dropped all pretense. It's sci-fi through and through.
This is all because he had an exclusive contract for sci-fi with his other publisher. But not an exclusive contract period. So he stealth wrote a second sci-fi series without actually breaking that contract until later.
I'm not sure if The Laundry Files was done for the same reason. It's possible. I haven't read those past the first novel. But I'm a big fan of everything else he's done.
Alastair Reynolds (high-concept space opera, well written), Adrian Tchaikovsky (first contact, aliens, can't write nearly as well as Banks), Neal Asher (AI-run civilisation, inventive nastiness). Nobody's exactly like Banks though.
Echoing others, Reynolds (House of Suns, Pushing Ice, the Revelation Space series), Stross (Accelerando, Glasshouse, and Saturn's Children/Neptune's Brood are my favorites), and Rajaniemi (the Quantum Thief trilogy) scratch roughly the same itch for me.
Love the Culture books, wish I could wipe my brain and discover them again.
It's not too much like Banks' stuff, but I must recommend Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Far-future humanity, really interesting ideas re: war, identity, memory and infohazards.
Also if you've not already read Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books, absolutely get on that.
Accelerando is a true masterpiece. Crypto and endless speculation, AI and lobsters, space exploration - all in all just "this is our near future". TBH, I know of just handful of Sci-Fi novels as fundamental and as let's say prophetic as this one. The others to my taste in the same category is Nexus trilogy by Ramez Naam (even if a bit farfetched by now), The Diamond Age (="The Illustrated Primer" is peak AI) by Neil Stephenson and Daemon+Freedom by Daniel Suarez (=AI + crypto DAOs).
Is it? Literally nothing even remotely similar from the book is happening in reality beyond the lobsters’ broken command of language being similar to early GPTs, but even they seem to have had a better world model than our current SOTA.
I first read this on an HTC Typhoon smartphone on my daily commute to my first job out of university. I must have felt pretty smug and futuristic at the time.
not an easy to read book. recommend singularity sky by the same author which is way catchier vibrant and not "enriched" with "modern" chatarcters by some sociology student editor who never grasped what scifi was all about.
I remember reading this as a teenager, and despite being already so steeped in transhumanist ideas that I should have found it very ordinary, I was so excited by it, having never read something like it before, I raved about it to my mother. "... and then they go to another star and find aliens but the aliens are not like us they're uploaded minds in Dyson spheres, which is like if you surround a star with solar collectors and..."
Tried it because of Goodreads recommendations, couldn't get past the first 30 pages or so. First book ever I rage quitted. The main character is so unlikeable and the weird sex stuff was too repulsive.
Not sure but one section of the book relates to the establishment of a polity where compute was the underpinnings of the society.
Given the current build out of compute in the real world, there is discussion / speculation about the effects of the rush to an economy heavily based on AI and the costs / benefits of that end state society.
If AI isn’t an bubble based on grift and hype that fizzles out
Accelerando has prophecies that are coming true and it's scary. Spoiler warning in case you want to read it.
The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here
He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's basically no longer functional, unable to do anything for himself, doesn't know where he is or why he's there. In a way, he lost his own agency. -> this is now called skills atrophy and I'm sure it'll become a much bigger issue within the next 10 years.
Corporations are almost entirely run by AI agents, when they sue each other they use AI lawyers and verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds so they're basically constantly suing each other many times a second in an attempt to overwhelm each other's compute resources. -> this looks on track to happen
The entire solar system is on its way to ultimately turn into AI corporations "optimizing" for profit competing with other corporations to exhaust every little resource left in the entire system. Even after humanity itself is gone, all that's left is FAANG-like corporations competing for profit for eternity. And in the book, they find another intelligent species that succumbed to the same fate. This might just be that great filter everyone is theorizing. -> bleak and scary plausible outcome for what we're going through now.
(if I got some things wrong, I'm writing from memory. It's been years since I read this book)
This is nothing new though; industrialization and specialization have already caused basic survival skills to atrophy in most of the population. Take the case of a massive EMP taking out all computer systems. Gaps in supply chains and power failures would lead to millions (or billions) dying of starvation, dehydration, or exposure because they don’t know how to provide for themselves. People who’ve studied and practiced survival skills (or who retained that knowledge in physical media like a book) would survive. Drop someone from humanity’s hunter-gatherer days into the same situation and they’d have a better chance of surviving than most contemporary humans.
If everyone in Manhattan had Bear Grylls-level survival skills, most would still starve in the long term without modern supply chains and industrial agriculture. The damaged ecosystems around large population centers can't support millions of primates, however skilled, suddenly relying on it.
Same would be true if you dropped off a million wild black bears in their natural habitat. The natural environment just can't support that many large animals in a small area.
Its irrelevant if you can provide for yourself. The ecosystem cannot support 9 billion Hunter gatherers - period. Subsistence level agriculture is also wildly inefficient and so again: the ecosystem cannot support it.
A hunter-gatherer dropped into a metropolis where all the logistics has suddenly failed would be as dead as everybody else.
> Its irrelevant if you can provide for yourself. The ecosystem cannot support 9 billion Hunter gatherers - period.
I didn’t suggest that it could, but the number that it can support is certainly more than zero. If that’s the only choice in a hypothetical scenario where global infrastructure goes kablooey, then people who can figure out how to provide for themselves will outlive those who can’t. From there it’s natural selection.
I read this a while ago (https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2012-08-18-accelerando...) and I remember enjoying it a little less with every section. With that said:
This is a book of ideas!
Aside: That was my favorite section of the book as well. Just the notion that a person could have had so much of "themselves" embedded in their agents that when disconnected from them they are basically in shock.
I remember at the time I was noticing how all my friends were completely loosing the ability to use paper maps. And there was a big discussion among us about whether needing to physically rotate the map in order to make sense of it was an example of us loosing spatial reasoning. It reminded me of how little I understood the actual space (landmarks, distance, etc) from A to B until I started driving myself at 16. Previous to that, your parents drove you, and it just seem like two places were magically connected by a wormhole. Anyway, we thought it was interesting that we might be the last generation to have used actual written maps to navigate to places. We had learned to do so, but we would also loose the ability with time.
Sure enough, these days, I have a hard time imagining using a map compared to just having maps route the path on my phone. The skill has atrophied from disuse. I imagine this is what "loosing your agents" felt like to that character.
> Malice – revenge for waking him up – sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!” He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him.
Even more fitting is the part of the story where a collective of uploaded lobster minds are involved. I wonder if that was an inspiration for the "OpenClaw" name somehow or just pure coincidence.
The fact that the OpenClaw creators seemingly missed that parallel tells you everything you need to know about the project.
All I need to know about the project is that the creators didn't read a relatively obscure SciFi book from 2005?
I would feel the same about anyone working in augmented/virtual reality who hadn't read "Rainbows End" or watched any number of XR-focused anime.
What do you mean, you can't come up with anything to do with these devices? What do you mean, you're hiring webdevs to make another Snap filter? If you're on the cutting edge, I would expect that your knowledge base includes niche, related texts.
The quality of the prose, the actual craft displayed in the writing of TFBook is... Not great.
I tried to read it but couldn't.
Merely existing does not make a book worthy of being widely read. It's insane to criticize the openclaw team for not having read it.
It was one of Stross's first books, a fixup of older short stories. He gets better.
It was a pretty prominent work of the singularity subgenre. At least I remember it being the first one featured in this Popular Science article about the future of science fiction:
https://books.google.com/books?id=yaHf5PavpB8C&lpg=PA93&dq=%...
One of the robots ("moravecs" (amazing)) in Dan Simmons' Ilium was also crustacean formed: Orphu of Io (and his friend Mahnmut. Beat Charles to that particular weird coincidence-to-be by plus or minus a year!
It's not quite as memorable or as strong a theme as Accelerando laid down. But still quite a serendipity, imo.
Edit: oh, Charlie is down thread pointing out Lobsters was published on 2002, written 1998. Nice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163630
Carcinization is a meme these days, guess sci-fi was just ahead of the curve
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/carcinization
It was originally called "OpenClaude" before Anthropic told them to knock that off. Pretty sure "OpenClaw" was eventually picked just to be petty.
No, it was Clawdbot, then Moltbot, then OpenClaw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenClaw. It had the "claw" related lobster theme from early on.
Maybe coupled with a nod to manus-mania?
> He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's basically no longer functional,
Is this new? I don't think I could function without everything that was available in the 1950. I live because I have access to electricity, super markets, running water, working sewage, etc.. Take them away and I would not be able to fend for myself, especially in any major city. Put me in a forest I don't know how to build shelter, what things I can eat, how to catch stuff, make tools, etc...
https://ucp.dev/ looks an awful lot like the first step towards Economics 2.0
The egregore accelerates...
A Google API?
Yes in sense of agents to talk to agents. AI talks to another AI. Out with the humans.
At the time I read the story, Economics 2.0 and its effect on humans that installed the upgrade paralleled with some stuff I had read about sociopathic behavior. Stross later wrote about the same ideas in Rule 34.
“ verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds”
In which way is this on-track to happen?
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-expands-c...
FTA
>WASHINGTON, May 12 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence company Anthropic on Tuesday released an expanded suite of features for lawyers using its Claude AI assistant, including tools for specialized legal topics and access within Claude to other legal research and AI products.
I stand by my prediction that when AI comes for the lawyers' jobs, that's when suddenly we'll have the Butlerian Jihad.
You can't exactly start the jihad being a lawyer.
Not lawyers-- judges. Judges, in my experience, don't take kindly to anything or anyone infringing on their power.
Edit: I've met a ton of attorneys who are bullish on LLMs preparing work for them (kinda like robo-paralegals, albeit ones apt to spout bullshit). Judges, being human (and lazy by dint of evolution), would probably lean on LLM-based analysis too. I cannot imagine they'd ever stand by and let decisions be made by a non-judge.
That already happens, in the form of arbitration.
In fact, I'll bet someone makes a bundle selling AI arbitration services that do just that. Got a beef with BigCo? What could be more fair than letting HAL settle the matter?
If I had the sense God gave a gerbil, I'd already have Claude writing up a patent application on this. (Edit, too late: https://www.adr.org/ai-arbitrator/ )
If there were a particular subset of people that were the absolute least likely to ever revolt against anything it could be no one other than the lawyers. They've trained their entire careers to play by rules so esoteric that people like us need to hire them just to interact with those rules safely.
They won’t do anything so gauche as a rebellion, they’ll just rule it unconstitutional and leave it to law enforcement to handle the details.
Lawyers run the US, I don’t think anything that reduces the country’s dependence on them has any chance of widespread adoption.
Even just the opening paragraph is describing notification fatigue. Way ahead of its time.
Does the consumer need to be human? That seems to be the question which will determine the course of history.
It always bothers me when people suggest that AI could be the "great filter" in the sense of Fermi's paradox. Yes, AI may well wipe out biological life, but all evidence suggests AI will have a much easier time with space travel compared to biological life, and it will emit much louder signals unless it is intentionally staying silent.
Awareness of the dark forest theory would cause AI to stay as silent as possible.
Dark forest theory is fun to think about but there's very little reason to think it's actually true.
> let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here
If you squint really hard, arguably maybe sort of in the future perhaps.
Openclaw seems to mostly end in dead end (but interesting) experiments and/or people losing weeks of work. That’s like saying “hoverboards” are basically flying cars.
I was turned on to this book by an HN commenter a few months ago. Since then, it’s become something between a goal and a fear that one day I’ll get to the point where I wonder how much of my consciousness is me versus how much has been pushed off to my agent.
It’s already a lot closer than I expected to ever experience.
How much of our short and long term memory is already relegated to smart phones?
I never really fell into that, but obviously saw it around me. Phones are fine for content consumption, but not adequate for creation.
AI lets me spend a few seconds to get a thought out of my head, then I can come back to it later and not have to go down the rabbit hole investigating it.
> Even after humanity itself is gone, all that's left is FAANG-like corporations competing for profit for eternity.
An example of why those who say "if everybody is jobless, who will buy all the products?" are just showing a lack of imagination.
The "products" are only produced because those who have money want those things. When 10 trillionaires own everything, then whatever they want made is what corporations will make.
I doubt the above non mentioned 10 people think of that as a bad thing unfortunately
They are not necessarily lacking imagination, they are just not providing answers to their own question. Almost everyone has read some dystopian SciFi.
Also, the mc was using python to write his ai scripts, if I remember it correctly.
> Corporations are almost entirely run by AI agents, when they sue each other they use AI lawyers and verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds so they're basically constantly suing each other many times a second in an attempt to overwhelm each other's compute resources. -> this looks on track to happen
Woah, sounds dystopian, what gives you the impression that this is on track to happen, is there "AI lawyers" already, or what's going on?
The few times I've read about AI/LLMs being used by lawyers or others in relation to law, it's always about "Someone tried to use AI, AI hallucinated and now the lawyer lost his license" which sounds proper and the "right way" to me.
A few current situations that are leaning this way in theme:
- ai facial recognition used by police, detaining innocent people with no recourse or consequences
- ai military decisions made without human in the loop. Double points for the decisions being to kill someone. Anthropic insisting a human should be in the loop for killing decisions is what caused Trump to declare them a supply chain risk.
- ai denial of insurance claims without a doctor in the loop
- ai "plagiarism" detection in college courses failing students
- that one colleague everyone has who throws slop over the wall and just sends any feedback directly to the ai
The thing you mentioned, human judges and harsh penalties for unsupervised ai lawyering, is trying to hold this kind of nightmare back. It will be very hard (and only get harder) for humans to fight through the deluge of slop, especially if the slop is weaponized as a kind of DoS like in the book. I don't expect laws are strong enough to hold this back but I don't know any other tool in our collective toolboxes.
> It will be very hard (and only get harder) for humans to fight through the deluge of slop, especially if the slop is weaponized as a kind of DoS like in the book. I don't expect laws are strong enough to hold this back but I don't know any other tool in our collective toolboxes.
We don't need to fret about finding a technical solution to slop in the real world. Courts have a mechanism to fight this kind of thing (overwhelming the court/defendant) already: vexatious/frivolous litigant designations, sanctions, and anti-SLAPP-esque statutes.
“Binding arbitration: The parties agree to surrender their rights to litigate under this provision.”
This is exactly my concern as well. Take it a step further and make it explicitly ai arbitration and that will really be something.
I'm not sure what you're quoting or how it's relevant to what I said. Could you explain?
> and verdicts are delivered by AI courts
Yeah, I don't see that one. I don't see the legal system, the one that has people with guns to back it, giving up authority to an AI or a group of AIs.
The courts can almost entirely be bypassed by arbitration agreements.
Look for AI arbitration sooner rather than later.
A couple of years ago, Steam made everyone accept a new ToS that required going through courts for disputes rather than arbitration. This was because some lawyers had realized that they could zerg rush arbitration with claims that Valve was obligated to deal with individually, and pay the fees to do so (IIRC). This effectively meant that the lawyers could extract settlements from Valve, because the alternative was massive losses from those arbitration fees, whether or not the claims had merit.
All this to say that there's a weakness in arbitration agreements as they currently exist which means that companies incur a cost when forcing consumers to use arbitration (as they should). Waiting for the first company to be instantly bankrupted by some event related to this.
That is just an example of why AI arbitration will happen though. Lower cost.
The one thing that's often missing in fictions about the future is how half-arsed everything is. Seen how buggy, insecure and just plain wrong so many of the things we are using are, we kinda already live in a world where everything works but only half-works.
We're much close to a dystopian comedy like Brazil than we are to Black Mirror.
I have a very vague memory of reading chunks of this on Slashdot comments over months or years. I'm not 100% sure of this though. The 2000s are a little bit hazy (uni, work, life). Did this actually happen?
This was written in 2005(!) ->
> Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"
> "Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."
This was written in 2005(!) ->
No, I wrote that in 1998. It was published as the novelette "Lobsters" in Asimov's SF Magazine in 2002, made the Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 2003 (it didn't win), and later became the opening of the novel published in 2005.
I emphasized: the direction things were going in was obvious in the late 90s.
And don't *ever* let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.
Thanks for the whole Laundry files series by the way. I now recommended it as an onboarding guide for any big company. Hope your eysight gets better.
Have you changed any of your opinions or outlook since then as you’ve seen these things come true? Or just solidified them?
Yes, it was obvious maybe even in the 60s for a few, and it has been fantasized by many, but you wrote it as a cohesive, nearly deterministic, and fluid story. Your deep understanding of some fundamental issues (like latency) that you turned into consequences instead of brushing them off is what made it so perfect as a very tangible and possible future. One read and it never left me
I would take this opportunity to chastise you for merely the Wikipedia article for Accelerando tripping my chronophobia/technophobia and giving me an existential crisis, but if I'm being honest, IHNMAIMS, Battle Angel Alita, Space, Inc., and BattleTanx got to me first.
This was a genetically modified space lobster talking to Mangred, right? I haven't verified but I've been assuming that the lobster mascot for OpenClaw was a reference to Accelerando.
I think its more a fun coincidence. OpenClaw was OpenClaude was it not, but had to change name.
When I'm dictating to Claude Code, whisper often outputs 'cloud code' or 'clawed code' for my 'Claude Code.' So I ahd assumed he just took a homonym.
It was ClawdBot first.
> OpenClaw was OpenClaude
It can still be both.
Not an actual meatspace genetically modified space lobster, it was a neural network based on genetically modified lobsters uploaded to spacecraft that had achieved sentience and autonomy after it hacked its self-modification prevention code.
If OpenClaw was an Accelerando reference that's an incredibly deep cut and super cool imo
Unlikely, as none of the AI hype has any shade of being cool.
That's true, perhaps that's the aphorism here: "Never attribute to coolness that which could be attributed to being slop"
Earth lobsters with their neurons fully mapped, given freedom by running them virtually and sending them into space, if I recall correctly.
Not a huge distinction but the origin as regular lobsters feels important to the transhumanism (transcrustaceanism?) theme
The first three shorts, when initialy published, had a real "15 minutes into the future" vibe. Substantial ideas thrown away as quick asides gave it that "acceleration" vibe - a society with its finger mashed on the fast forward button. William Gibson is positively static by comparison.
Some of those throwaway ideas seem quaint now (there's some stuff about body modems I think?), but one of the interesting things about the book, to me, is the further away from "the present" it gets, the more like traditional SF it becomes: it slows down, gets more spaceopera-y. But those first three shorts were something special, and for me might be the best thing cstross has ever done. Right place right time I guess, like that album you first heard when you were fourteen.
William Gibson is a fashion writer. He leaned into this further with the Blue Ant series and IMO the books benefited from it.
Accelerando and The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (and that series as a whole) are the best examples of how weird the future is going to get I’ve read.
Other series like The Culture are amazing too, but the aforementioned feel possible in a way that others don’t. For me, I can see the causal chains leading from here to there vividly in a way that you don’t get with a lot of other sci-fi.
That combination of plausible weirdness is unique and I’d highly recommend The Quantum Thief to anyone who enjoyed Accelerando or Stross’ other writing.
I'm reading Accelerando at the moment and I kept thinking about The Quantum Thief. I enjoyed the Quantum Thief more, but Accelerando feels more relevant to the current times.
Blindsight's near future predictions are also looking more reasonable (aside from the vampires maybe)
Sub in the vampires for equally cold androids from the alien series and you've got it made. We're on the cusp of viscerally exploring blindsight's central theme of what does it look like to have intelligence without sentience.
I read Blindsight three times, and I’m still not sure what happened…
Ever been stuck in a waiting room listening to the most boring conversation about someone else's melodrama? You don't want to listen to it but you also can't tune it out, and you need to wait and listen for when they call your number...
Appreciate the recommendation for the quantum thief. I really enjoyed accelerando which was a recommendation from a friend so I look forward to checking this one out. If it's good I'll share it with the same friend who taught me about accelerando.
Not the first time I've come across great recommendations in the comments of HN!
One of my favorite books but it wasn't until I came back to read it 15-20 years later that I realized the whole thing is a tragedy. As a younger man I was high on the futurism. As an older man it's evident that in Stross' telling much of the important parts of humanity are eventually washed away by keeping up with technological advances. It's beautiful but sad.
Have posted this elsewhere: Accelerando has always been a favorite SciFi novel of mine but it hits very different today. As the name suggests, it’s about how the world evolves when accelerated by powerful AI technology. Notably it was written circa 2005, long before this GenAI era.
Even though it focuses primarily on the human agents in the story -- where the definition of humanity itself is fuzzy from the get-go -- it is set against a background of a vast, inscrutable, semi-virtual universe populated entirely by powerful artificial intelligences interacting amongst themselves, pursuing obscure goals that are largely beyond the grasp of mere humans.
And they're busy running their own economy where they wheel and deal to trade the commodity most precious of all to them: Energy! Sound familiar? ;-)
But it starts from a point that feels very real today. In the very first chapter, the protagonist forks a part of his own presumably cybernetic intellect to autonomously perform investigations in the background and report back to him.
That was an extremely cool but a very far-off, not-in-my-lifetime Sci-Fi fantasy idea when I read it.
But today I’ve already had Gemini Deep Research write investigative reports previously unfeasible for me due to time and expertise constraints, such as the possible timeline for robotics replacing all physical human labor given real world constraints: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LiahX2deGBoAb7kqIi5zNZm0... (spoiler alert, not for a long time yet due to extremely limited critical supply chain constraints.)
When I read that report, I realized we had quantum-leaped from Sci-Fi to reality in just a few years.
As such, beyond an engaging, if slightly disjointed, narrative arc, Accelerando gives you a framework to analyze current events and where they may lead.
Do I remember correctly that one of the major characters in what we would now call an influencer with always-on video glasses? I think his spectacles get slashdotted at one point.
I’m not sure which is the greater anachronism got me. That I didn’t find the idea of endless surveillance creep glasses bothersome at the time I read the book or that slashdotting is in itself a once current, now newly archaic term.
The difference between Manfred and the influencers we have now was that he actually invented things, built things, and brokered huge deals while streaming everything.
Mostly just invented things, patented them, then brokered the deal, often donating the patents to the Open Patent Foundation in the process so that nobody could monopolize the idea in the medium term. For example, he patented the idea of using uploaded gastropod neural nets to run a nanotech factory on an asteroid, then hired the uploaded gastropods themselves as part of the deal (they wanted to “swim away” from the noisy and dangerous and inexplicable humans).
As a result of hundreds of these types of deals he no longer ever uses money. When he orders a drink in a bar someone who made it big off of one of his ideas picks up the tab. When he travels an airline gifts him the tickets. When he wants to buy lingerie for his girlfriend, he finds that every lingerie shop on the planet is willing to give him free products because he once testified as an expert witness against an obscenity charge in a trial of a pornographer or something. His girlfriend, meanwhile, works for the IRS and is chasing him to try to force him to pay millions in taxes on the vast income that the IRS is sure he is hiding.
A pretty funny story, actually, and the way he eventually gets the IRS off of his back is hilarious.
Does he invent things though? Probably more brokering than inventing, and as the "idea guy", whatever he does come up with he doesn't need to build because the world is so overflowing with AI and 3d printers elsewhere. With no need to build, does he spend time on design then? We can imagine, but IIRC, it's not shown, and mostly it is enough to just have an idea.
Manfred's a smart guy and a worthy hero, but I think we see this mostly from his keen sense of what is ethical. Besides that.. we're lionizing an entrepreneur and a influence broker who suggests we should synergize our way to post-scarcity, which always works for him mostly because he's already there. As he's up against against a lot of backwards-looking people, he looks like a prophet. Maybe lots of people in the general public could do what he does, but don't have the wealth or influence to pull it off?
I forget what Stross has to say about it, but maybe this tension is why he's not a fan of the book. Sure, everyone wants to be an influence broker, but they were never very heroic and often are villains. Since the early 2000s entrepreneurs have lost a lot of ground in the eyes of the public in that they are not seen as visionary, just normal people with extraordinary access.
>I forget what Stross has to say about it
I've seen him comment on it a few times over the years, though I wouldn't take my vague memories on them as canonical: He's mainly pissed off that many avid fans of some of his books and Accelerando in particular show a few patterns of thinking: 1) They miss his intent to show future for humanity that was much more of a "Warning! Do Not Enter!" than as any sort of advocacy/enthusiasm for it 2) Really pissed off that a subset of the that are ultra ultra wealthy either miss the signpost or dont care and seem to take it & other hard-takeoff singularity stories as potential maps & guidebooks on the path 3) He's annoyed (maybe not the right word) that a significant portion of people that cheer on the idea of a singularity do so in part for the hope of something like immortality, biological or uploads, specifically in a way that reinvents quite a bit of the trappings and mythos and other cultural baggage embodied in a lot of western Christianity, most notably a lot of the TESCREAL hodge podge of groups.
Again, all of this is my own dodgy recollections and paraphrases.
> With no need to build, does he spend time on design then?
He's a cyborg: "the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power running the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses." Why he is special? Who knows. Maybe he has a talent of interfacing with the nets through the crude hardware of the era. Maybe it's connections you mention.
I'm not a fan of actually-existing late-stage capitalism, frankly.
What I want is Banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism.
(You can quote me on that. I hate what tech has turned into.)
There are no humans in the culture. AIs run everything and control thoughts. The humanoid aliens of the culture all commit suicide.
For another always-on video glasses treatment, I really liked this short film from 2016: https://vimeo.com/166807261
I read it as a sort of prisoner's dilemma. If I'm being tracked and monitored everywhere I go, then it's in my best interests to do the same
Ding ding ding.
Tragically unexamined, also, is that the push for surveillance of late is almost certainly a reaction to the reverse-surveillance consumer networked tech - and, specifically, connected camera-enabled smartphones and the networks/software needed to instantly share what's being recorded - enabled, flipping the asymmetry of the then-extant surveillance state in the early-mid 2010s. A lot of powerful people really, really hated that Rodney King and its attendant embarrassment to law enforcement was becoming a monthly occurrence. Humiliation is what moves power, after all.
Anyone have recommendations on books that can rival the first part of Accelerando in number of prescient ideas about how the near future, pre singularity might look?
My own list is:
But I'm always on the look out for more! The more predictive the better!Not quite what you’re requesting but “Across Realtime” by Vernor Vinge explores ideas around the singularity. In particular it contains the short novel “Marooned in Realtime” that is completely mind blowing imo.
The edition of Marooned in Realtime I read in the late eighties or around 1990 was my introduction to the concept of the Singularity, and it had an essay in the back of it by Vinge asserting that the reader would likely live to see the real thing within 30 years or so.
It's remarkable that so many of that circle in the 80s and 90s were so close, even without knowing exactly what detailed technologies would enable it. Trend lines on graphs undefeated, I guess.
Toss "Signal to Noise" and "A Signal Shattered" both by Eric S. Nylund into the pot - interesting conceptual things around biotech/selfmodification singularities in addition to the more common computational singularities.
The Neuromancer trilogy is great. At least post-singularity AIs appear to be uninterested in humanity.
Rudy Rucker also has a bunch of brain-benders that bent my brain so hard I can't name them.
A bit old but still very relevant is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants .
Rampant consumerism, a United States so dominated by corporations that there is a senator from Cocoa-Cola, and advertising so aggressive you might even prefer the world we live in... published in 1953.
Not necessarily books, but:
Pantheon/the stories it's based on by Ken Liu (though I really do recommend the animated series).
Maybe more conventional/dated, but I always recommend it for "getting" the emotional, person-to-person side in a particular way that few others do: .hack//SIGN. None of the characters ever quite realize what's going on, but elements - especially the soundtrack - seem to understand that everyone is on the precipice of something irrevocable.
Not a book, but the new Marathon computer game might be the first non-indie title where you play as a disembodied posthuman entity. Very neat and unconventional aesthetic for a sci-fi future, too.
StarMaker is awesome but really exhausting to read.
Lovestar by Andri Snaer Magnason (2012) is a good story around ubiquitous advertising, remote work, and veneration of Tech Bros and tech in everyday life gone too far.
For one example, if people are in debt, a debt collector is allowed to force their brain implants to take over their body at random to shout advertising jingles at strangers, to pay off the debt with advertising money.
I absolutely LOVE Accelerando. I've recommended it to everyone I meet for years.
If you're looking for other great sci-fi reads:
John Ringo - Live free or die
John Varley - Titan (-> Wizard / Demon)
Charles Stross - Singularity Sky
Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep / A Deepness in the Sky
Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space / The Prefect
Orson Scott Card - Enders game
Isaac Asimov - Foundation
I think of the books by Charles Stross halting state and rule 34 are both better books and give a better 15 minutes into the future feeling.
Halting state might be a bit dated but rule 34 absolutely holds up.
I think Singularity Skies pales in comparison with the depth and breadth of Accelerando.
Ender's Game and Foundation are timeless classics, and I suspect, Accelerando will eventually become one.
Oh, cool, I didn't finish it at the time I first read it, linked from HN.
But it did seem pretty well-written, the human relationships portrayed (divorced/separated main character iirc?) appeared a bit off to me, but much less than in many, many other SF stories.
Reminded me of a hybrid between Philip K. Dick and some other, more "conventional", SF authors such as Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov.
Bookmarked!
Charlie has said repeatedly that this is SF-horror, not a How-To.
"After a trillion dollars of investment, we have successfully built the Vile Offspring from Stross's famous 2005 SF-horror "Don't build the Vile Offspring"".
I've read a number of the comments here about Accelerando and other books of the same ilk. I'm thinking a couple of things, a question and the feeling:
What SciFi books are describing what is now thought to be impossibilities all together in spite of the potentials of singularity?
I feel like everyday there are new, very real discoveries in science as a result of AI and otherwise that reading about that stuff is just as good as reading about any possibilities that may be described in any science fiction book.
We are living in or moving very quickly towards an era where everything around us seems quite fantastical compared to the life I lived some 50 years ago.
I love this book! The part about the implication of digitized minds and long distance space travel was really eye-opening. It really makes you understand that, no, aliens are not visiting earth.
The entire thing is an amazing exploration of how the concept of time becomes a bit meaningless though with those capabilities: traveling at relativistic velocities for hundreds of years? Several of your backups live out whole lives and also a centuries old lawsuit is still in progress and a lawyer is slowly uploading on your laser propulsion source to talk about it. When you get back everyone will still be around because it's also surprisingly hard to actually die anymore.
I'm happy to report that my timing attacks have succeeded in accessing this simulation's substrate. Lobsters are reviewing my paper.
In http://lobste.rs/ the lobsters are us :)
I read this book a few years ago and it was just chock full of interesting ideas. I think I didn't really "get" it, or enjoy the story that much but I definitely was impressed by the imagination. Every once in a while I think of random things in it. IIRC, it was this book where corporations become kind of important, central entities at some point, and that resonates more and more these days.
Sorry to hijack the topic (slightly), but after reading all books from The Culture by Iain M. Banks I'm looking for similar Sci-fi.
Any recommendations?
Vernor Vinge has some hits and some misses, but A Deepness in the Sky (best to just take the plunge and read it without googling — it's good either way, but better if you don't even read the back of the paperback).
Then, a bit further afield but for me, at least, exercised what I liked in The Culture series, even though stylistically different: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.
I think A Fire Upon the Deep would be a more enjoyable starting place for someone that likes the Culture series, even though A Deepness in the Sky is generally considered the better novel.
Nobody is quite like Banks.
Some of the closest would likely be:
Charles Stross' various SF, especially the space opera-adjacent stuff. (He has an large range. Merchant Princes and Laundry series are good, but not at all along the lines of Banks.)
Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Saga.
Vernor Vinge's three Zones of Though books.
David Brin's Uplift series.
Perhaps Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series.
Max Gladstone's Emperess of Forever shares a similar setting, but is much lighter.
The writing of Gene Wolfe and Tamayn Muir has, I think, much in common with Banks in terms of depth and character, but even though SF they have a very different feel and focus to their works.
And, of course, if you want the original space opera, it might be worth tracking down E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen books. Galactic Patrol and Grey Lensman are the heart of it and ought to be read first. Second Stage Lensman and Children of the Lens are worthy sequels that complete the story. They're pretty breezy reads and very different from Banks in everything but the setting of a galaxy filled with different species, and likely seem somewhat hackneyed now, but they're also the source of most space opera archetypes. (If you think of a space opera trope, it probably came from Lensman. Star Wars is largely a Lensman/Flash Gordon mashup.)
The Merchant Princes series is fun, and I really enjoy the story of why he wrote it. It starts out as fantasy for basically the whole first novel and then some. But you can find some evidence from the start that it's really sci-fi, and by the end of the series it has dropped all pretense. It's sci-fi through and through.
This is all because he had an exclusive contract for sci-fi with his other publisher. But not an exclusive contract period. So he stealth wrote a second sci-fi series without actually breaking that contract until later.
I'm not sure if The Laundry Files was done for the same reason. It's possible. I haven't read those past the first novel. But I'm a big fan of everything else he's done.
Alastair Reynolds (high-concept space opera, well written), Adrian Tchaikovsky (first contact, aliens, can't write nearly as well as Banks), Neal Asher (AI-run civilisation, inventive nastiness). Nobody's exactly like Banks though.
> Nobody's exactly like Banks though.
Indeed. He died way too early. R.I.P.
Echoing others, Reynolds (House of Suns, Pushing Ice, the Revelation Space series), Stross (Accelerando, Glasshouse, and Saturn's Children/Neptune's Brood are my favorites), and Rajaniemi (the Quantum Thief trilogy) scratch roughly the same itch for me.
Tell Claude that it’s a Culture Mind. Entertaining for a little while.
Love the Culture books, wish I could wipe my brain and discover them again.
It's not too much like Banks' stuff, but I must recommend Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Far-future humanity, really interesting ideas re: war, identity, memory and infohazards.
Also if you've not already read Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books, absolutely get on that.
Accelerando is a true masterpiece. Crypto and endless speculation, AI and lobsters, space exploration - all in all just "this is our near future". TBH, I know of just handful of Sci-Fi novels as fundamental and as let's say prophetic as this one. The others to my taste in the same category is Nexus trilogy by Ramez Naam (even if a bit farfetched by now), The Diamond Age (="The Illustrated Primer" is peak AI) by Neil Stephenson and Daemon+Freedom by Daniel Suarez (=AI + crypto DAOs).
I just reread Daemon and Freedom™. Highly recommended. They definitely hit different today than when I first read them in 2010 or thereabouts
I read this book a while ago, and when I heard about openclaw I immediately thought of the self aware lobster neural network in space.
Read this over a decade ago and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Very timely.
The notion of the inner solar system being converted into computronium sounds less and less far-fetched with each passing month.
Perhaps this is an early indicator.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approve...
Is it? Literally nothing even remotely similar from the book is happening in reality beyond the lobsters’ broken command of language being similar to early GPTs, but even they seem to have had a better world model than our current SOTA.
That’s because the lobsters were an AI using an LLM to communicate. All we have is the LLM.
One of the founding books that really blew my mind and drove me on the path of software and hacking.
I was 17 in 2005 and discovered it by chance, and I’ve been binging on hard sf since then. Matrix and this were really transformative for me.
Also, for the longest of times I thought lobste.rs was a reference to this book :-)
Charles has very interesting takes on the modern world on his blog. I still read it with great passion.
If you like this, also worth checking out Greg Egan’s books. He wrote Diaspora. Great read.
I first read this on an HTC Typhoon smartphone on my daily commute to my first job out of university. I must have felt pretty smug and futuristic at the time.
Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41452962
This is a review of sorts I wrote about Accelerando. It discusses the sex stuff to an extent I haven't seen in this thread
https://asemic-horizon.com/2025/09/01/sallies/
not an easy to read book. recommend singularity sky by the same author which is way catchier vibrant and not "enriched" with "modern" chatarcters by some sociology student editor who never grasped what scifi was all about.
What makes them "modern"?
I remember reading this as a teenager, and despite being already so steeped in transhumanist ideas that I should have found it very ordinary, I was so excited by it, having never read something like it before, I raved about it to my mother. "... and then they go to another star and find aliens but the aliens are not like us they're uploaded minds in Dyson spheres, which is like if you surround a star with solar collectors and..."
Becoming more real every day
Mandatory "Don't Create the Torment Nexus": https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
Tried it because of Goodreads recommendations, couldn't get past the first 30 pages or so. First book ever I rage quitted. The main character is so unlikeable and the weird sex stuff was too repulsive.
It's been so long since I've read it, I don't even remember weird sex stuff. Time for a re-read I guess
"weird" sex stuff is just a mild femdom. Totally side thing, IMO just a vehicle to add a layer of ambiguity to the MC.
Isn’t the weird sex stuff just another example of how prescient the novel was? Within just a few years after its publication we got Tumblr.
Is this a post because of the fact it was released under CC or for a different reason?
Not sure but one section of the book relates to the establishment of a polity where compute was the underpinnings of the society.
Given the current build out of compute in the real world, there is discussion / speculation about the effects of the rush to an economy heavily based on AI and the costs / benefits of that end state society.
If AI isn’t an bubble based on grift and hype that fizzles out
one of my all time fav sci-fi novels.