alt.hn

5/16/2026 at 11:36:32 AM

Accelerando (2005)

 https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html

by eamag

5/16/2026 at 1:30:13 PM

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)

by SonnyTark

5/16/2026 at 9:50:21 PM

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.

by stephen_cagle

5/16/2026 at 2:24:33 PM

> 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.

by ian_j_butler

5/17/2026 at 1:01:44 AM

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.

by mcmcmc

5/17/2026 at 2:50:56 AM

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.

by varenc

5/17/2026 at 7:31:25 PM

Which is why every major city center is where the apocalypse actually occurs

Go look at Gaza or Lebanon if you want to look into the future of what being in a city that is dominated by a technologically capable adversary with no remorse would look like.

by AndrewKemendo

5/17/2026 at 7:12:35 AM

> 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.

Hahaha, bless. I'm one of those people, I hunt, so I spend a lot of time out in the wilderness.

And if civilisation suddenly collapsed? My hunting and survival skills aren't going to do shit when I'm surrounded by thousands of other people who are competing for the same limited pool of resources. I might be able to identify the signs that a deer has browsed here recently, but so can many other people, and when we all turn up in the same forest looking for food en masse, well there's only so many deer a given area can support.

> 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.

Unfortunately, as the contemporary humans will likely resort to banditry to supplement their survival chances, your idealized hunter-gatherers are doomed to being stood over at best, murderered at worst.

by EdwardDiego

5/17/2026 at 2:45:09 AM

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.

by XorNot

5/17/2026 at 4:28:22 AM

> 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.

by mcmcmc

5/17/2026 at 7:08:04 AM

Whether you survive is going to be almost entirely determined by factors not in your control and an obtainable skillset is statistically insignificant. The one critical skill is the one people discount almost immediately: social.

You're statistically likely to simply be stuck in collapsing logistics system alongside everyone else: whether you can kill and dress your own rabbit doesn't matter because their aren't any.

by XorNot

5/16/2026 at 3:11:13 PM

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.

by growt

5/16/2026 at 4:07:56 PM

The fact that the OpenClaw creators seemingly missed that parallel tells you everything you need to know about the project.

by lxgr

5/16/2026 at 8:24:38 PM

All I need to know about the project is that the creators didn't read a relatively obscure SciFi book from 2005?

by spellboots

5/16/2026 at 8:40:34 PM

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.

by underlipton

5/16/2026 at 8:47:10 PM

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.

by stackghost

5/16/2026 at 11:57:57 PM

It was one of Stross's first books, a fixup of older short stories. He gets better.

by shawn_w

5/17/2026 at 10:27:58 AM

gets more conventional, you mean. the book is outstanding.

by watt

5/17/2026 at 11:08:06 AM

I think he peaked in the aughts - his latest stuff is ho-hum.

by hnmullany

5/17/2026 at 7:27:36 PM

accelerando is not exactly obscure!

by gpderetta

5/16/2026 at 8:57:50 PM

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

by jauntywundrkind

5/16/2026 at 3:35:13 PM

It was originally called "OpenClaude" before Anthropic told them to knock that off. Pretty sure "OpenClaw" was eventually picked just to be petty.

by combobyte

5/16/2026 at 4:01:54 PM

Maybe coupled with a nod to manus-mania?

by _0ffh

5/16/2026 at 2:10:48 PM

https://ucp.dev/ looks an awful lot like the first step towards Economics 2.0

by __MatrixMan__

5/16/2026 at 10:12:38 PM

The egregore accelerates...

by andai

5/16/2026 at 3:05:46 PM

A Google API?

by staplers

5/16/2026 at 3:29:42 PM

Yes in sense of agents to talk to agents. AI talks to another AI. Out with the humans.

by Glohrischi

5/17/2026 at 12:47:31 AM

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.

by Thegn

5/17/2026 at 12:04:58 PM

He also predicted smart contracts and DAOs (in accelerando) as well as crypto games and the associated heists (in "Halting State"). Unlike the AI, those predictions are eerily accurate and describe the real mechanics pretty well.

by miki123211

5/16/2026 at 11:23:53 PM

> 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...

by socalgal2

5/17/2026 at 7:35:00 PM

This boggles my mind because you know how incapable you are during a crisis, and yet you seem content in that state.

Help me understand the cognitive dissonance and how you deal with it

by AndrewKemendo

5/17/2026 at 9:17:21 PM

Even knowing how those things work, it might not be viable if you're in a large city.

by a_t48

5/17/2026 at 11:41:06 PM

Which is why you make plans for how to leave the city and go to someplace safe.

You would work with your friends and family on that kind of disaster preparedness exercise.

This is extremely common to the point where literally anyone can become CERT trained

https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/individuals-communit...

by AndrewKemendo

5/18/2026 at 3:06:09 AM

> how to build shelter, what things I can eat, how to catch stuff, make tools, etc...

None of GP's examples appear to be covered by that training

by dooglius

5/16/2026 at 5:18:27 PM

“ verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds”

In which way is this on-track to happen?

by tintor

5/16/2026 at 5:27:51 PM

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.

by btreecat

5/16/2026 at 6:06:02 PM

I stand by my prediction that when AI comes for the lawyers' jobs, that's when suddenly we'll have the Butlerian Jihad.

by mullingitover

5/16/2026 at 11:30:57 PM

You can't exactly start the jihad being a lawyer.

by Muromec

5/17/2026 at 12:08:49 PM

Big tech went from cool corporations to enemies of the people after they made journalists less relevant. The journalists fought back. I can definitely imagine the same happening with AI and lawyers, except that lawyers are far, far more powerful.

by miki123211

5/16/2026 at 8:03:01 PM

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.

by EvanAnderson

5/16/2026 at 9:50:53 PM

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/ )

by CamperBob2

5/16/2026 at 6:28:47 PM

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.

by NoMoreNicksLeft

5/16/2026 at 7:05:55 PM

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.

by mullingitover

5/16/2026 at 6:02:06 PM

Lawyers run the US, I don’t think anything that reduces the country’s dependence on them has any chance of widespread adoption.

by ileonichwiesz

5/16/2026 at 10:40:38 PM

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.

by daynthelife

5/17/2026 at 12:28:14 AM

Awareness of the dark forest theory would cause AI to stay as silent as possible.

by BLKNSLVR

5/17/2026 at 10:18:07 PM

To the extent that's true, the same would then apply to any sufficiently intelligent life. So if that's the crux of the argument, it has nothing to do with AI being a great filter.

by daynthelife

5/17/2026 at 12:47:36 AM

Dark forest theory is fun to think about but there's very little reason to think it's actually true.

by andrewflnr

5/16/2026 at 10:09:46 PM

Does the consumer need to be human? That seems to be the question which will determine the course of history.

by andai

5/16/2026 at 11:24:03 PM

Even just the opening paragraph is describing notification fatigue. Way ahead of its time.

by chatmasta

5/17/2026 at 7:29:08 PM

It’s been unambiguous that this was the trajectory for anyone who has any serious interest thinking about millenia/galaxy scales.

It’s been written about since writing was available and with increasingly resolution ever since.

by AndrewKemendo

5/16/2026 at 7:55:01 PM

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.

by Ancapistani

5/16/2026 at 8:16:20 PM

How much of our short and long term memory is already relegated to smart phones?

by bombcar

5/16/2026 at 9:39:00 PM

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.

by Ancapistani

5/16/2026 at 1:49:14 PM

> 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.

by dist-epoch

5/16/2026 at 7:37:02 PM

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.

by exe34

5/16/2026 at 11:34:48 PM

I doubt the above non mentioned 10 people think of that as a bad thing unfortunately

by Muromec

5/16/2026 at 2:00:30 PM

They are not necessarily lacking imagination, they are just not providing answers to their own question. Almost everyone has read some dystopian SciFi.

by generic92034

5/17/2026 at 3:41:49 AM

> 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.

by Forgeties79

5/16/2026 at 3:37:13 PM

> 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.

by embedding-shape

5/16/2026 at 4:08:42 PM

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.

by collingreen

5/16/2026 at 5:34:53 PM

> 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.

by nozzlegear

5/16/2026 at 8:29:23 PM

“Binding arbitration: The parties agree to surrender their rights to litigate under this provision.”

by cwillu

5/16/2026 at 9:06:16 PM

This is exactly my concern as well. Take it a step further and make it explicitly ai arbitration and that will really be something.

by collingreen

5/16/2026 at 9:50:08 PM

I'm not sure what you're quoting or how it's relevant to what I said. Could you explain?

by nozzlegear

5/16/2026 at 7:38:08 PM

Also, the mc was using python to write his ai scripts, if I remember it correctly.

by gostsamo

5/16/2026 at 4:09:23 PM

> 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.

by AnimalMuppet

5/16/2026 at 8:17:13 PM

The courts can almost entirely be bypassed by arbitration agreements.

Look for AI arbitration sooner rather than later.

by bombcar

5/16/2026 at 8:49:28 PM

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.

by underlipton

5/17/2026 at 4:57:16 AM

That is just an example of why AI arbitration will happen though. Lower cost.

by zargon

5/18/2026 at 3:38:10 AM

As I said, someone will make this incorrect assumption one day, and Gen Alpha will be introduced to that one South Park meme.

by underlipton

5/16/2026 at 10:01:08 PM

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.

by TacticalCoder

5/16/2026 at 1:33:03 PM

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."

by utilityhotbar

5/16/2026 at 8:46:11 PM

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.

by cstross

5/16/2026 at 11:39:45 PM

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.

by Muromec

5/16/2026 at 8:58:19 PM

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

by juliendorra

5/17/2026 at 10:39:44 PM

> And don't ever let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI

As an avid reader of your blog I would never presume such a thing lightly, even when thinking about your old work. Also really enjoyed what I read of Laundry Files :)

by utilityhotbar

5/16/2026 at 11:26:20 PM

Have you changed any of your opinions or outlook since then as you’ve seen these things come true? Or just solidified them?

by chatmasta

5/17/2026 at 7:37:20 PM

It was optimistic in the sense that at least something resembling humanity survives the AI-Apocalypse at least!

[big fan of all your writings here!]

by gpderetta

5/16/2026 at 8:59:50 PM

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.

by grehbies

5/17/2026 at 12:45:16 PM

Unfortunately many people read Accelerando maybe not as a utopia, but at least as an excuse to ignore many pressing modern-day problems, for the simple reason that they would soon be obviated by technological progress. That is, why worry about climate change or cancer when nanotechnology will solve both problems without side-effects? Or, in one episode of Community when Troy and Abed object to saving money for a jacket since by the time they can afford it they'll be living on a moon base.

This, I've come to realize, is the problem with science fiction - it discourages us from caring about the human problems we have today because we want to believe things will be so different tomorrow that our efforts today would be wasted. It becomes a convenient excuse to avoid doing anything, adopting a wait-and-see approach that is only distinguishable from solipsism via subjective self-regard. The accelerationists have a dishonest, disrespectful attitude about subjects like the biosphere in which we live (science fiction having taught them it is easily reproduced), access to fresh water (sf rarely speaking about this, the exception being Paulo Bacalupi), and real living standards (sf's favorite victim; the singularity is fascism's greatest ally, a soporific that helps otherwise intelligent people sleep-walk into chains). We all want the Star Trek magic-bullet solution that scales and doesn't require anyone to dedicate their lives to teaching villages how to avoid dysentery or why educating your kids might be a good idea. We all want laser guns that don't need ammunition and don't overheat, and flying machines that have no moving parts, and all the other marvels that finally (finally!) let us have the power of tools without requiring any knowledge.

So, yes, Accelerando is definitely techno-optimistic because whole classes of problems go away once you simulate humans. If you intended this to be a dystopian scenario you might have added something to give the reader the impression that these simulations were imperfect or degraded. Instead, you just gave yet another incredibly potent rationalization for rich people to not give a fuck about reality. Fun story though.

by simpaticoder

5/17/2026 at 11:06:41 PM

Quite the straw-man of accelerationism you've managed here.

by azaqura

5/17/2026 at 9:15:16 AM

That's what you assume the intent of the author is, I asked WhateverGPT and it confirmed that it was definitely pro-AI! /s

by utopiah

5/17/2026 at 2:28:59 PM

no, that is the actual author. He's been here a long time.

by awithrow

5/17/2026 at 7:36:37 PM

Yes... that's the joke, that's what the trailing "/s" was for. I also noticed they said "I" in their reply.

by utopiah

5/16/2026 at 2:17:57 PM

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.

by _alternator_

5/16/2026 at 3:03:16 PM

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.

by adamgordonbell

5/16/2026 at 11:29:44 PM

It was ClawdBot first.

by chatmasta

5/16/2026 at 3:37:45 PM

> OpenClaw was OpenClaude

It can still be both.

by rbanffy

5/16/2026 at 2:58:25 PM

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

by jaggederest

5/16/2026 at 11:41:42 PM

Unlikely, as none of the AI hype has any shade of being cool.

by Muromec

5/16/2026 at 11:47:16 PM

That's true, perhaps that's the aphorism here: "Never attribute to coolness that which could be attributed to being slop"

by jaggederest

5/16/2026 at 4:13:27 PM

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

by collingreen

5/17/2026 at 1:06:59 PM

I also loved:

"It looks like they're doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast --- a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, ..."

by momentoftop

5/16/2026 at 12:58:09 PM

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.

by flir

5/16/2026 at 3:37:40 PM

William Gibson is a fashion writer. He leaned into this further with the Blue Ant series and IMO the books benefited from it.

by snovv_crash

5/16/2026 at 2:30:39 PM

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.

by sohex

5/16/2026 at 3:00:16 PM

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.

by danschuller

5/16/2026 at 3:43:59 PM

Blindsight's near future predictions are also looking more reasonable (aside from the vampires maybe)

by jdr23bc

5/16/2026 at 8:01:52 PM

I read Blindsight three times, and I’m still not sure what happened…

by Ancapistani

5/18/2026 at 4:33:01 AM

Blindsight made some amount of sense to me, but Echopraxia lost me at some point.

by BLKNSLVR

5/17/2026 at 11:47:44 AM

Same. Although tbf this is a defining feature of many of my favourite sci-fi novels. Whenever I revisit the Sprawl or the Bridge trilogies I always notice something I completely missed before.

by phrotoma

5/17/2026 at 2:52:29 AM

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...

by XorNot

5/16/2026 at 4:11:04 PM

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.

by collingreen

5/16/2026 at 5:35:24 PM

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!

by btreecat

5/17/2026 at 8:52:57 AM

Looks like singularity panic is having a bit of a moment on Hacker News. In the past day:

Accelerando (2005) (antipope.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159241

Too Much Is Happening Too Fast (theatlantic.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163631

We've made the world too complicated (user8.bearblog.dev) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158065

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis (twitter.com/mitchellh) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379

Leaving the Physical World (eff.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084012

by dTal

5/16/2026 at 7:50:54 PM

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.

by jshaqaw

5/16/2026 at 12:57:50 PM

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.

by colinb

5/16/2026 at 1:17:56 PM

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.

by Hizonner

5/16/2026 at 2:25:28 PM

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.

by db48x

5/16/2026 at 2:55:01 PM

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.

by ian_j_butler

5/16/2026 at 7:35:53 PM

>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.

by ineedasername

5/16/2026 at 7:22:29 PM

> 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.

by red75prime

5/16/2026 at 8:48:30 PM

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.)

by cstross

5/17/2026 at 4:16:27 AM

There are no humans in the culture. AIs run everything and control thoughts. The humanoid aliens of the culture all commit suicide.

by Vecr

5/16/2026 at 3:02:44 PM

For another always-on video glasses treatment, I really liked this short film from 2016: https://vimeo.com/166807261

by lelandfe

5/16/2026 at 8:58:52 PM

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

by motoroco

5/16/2026 at 9:14:17 PM

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.

by underlipton

5/16/2026 at 1:04:47 PM

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!

by FL33TW00D

5/16/2026 at 1:28:39 PM

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.

by le-mark

5/16/2026 at 3:44:14 PM

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.

by randallsquared

5/16/2026 at 3:00:31 PM

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.

by jaggederest

5/16/2026 at 3:42:51 PM

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.

by rbanffy

5/17/2026 at 9:05:05 AM

Apparently Counting Heads is currently a freebie for audible premium. Rainbows.. overrated IMHO.

Nexus series has a great story with great pacing, classic cyberpunk ambiance with genuinely fresh takes, but be warned.. fairly bad writing. Astonishing that there is no movie yet because it really seems like one of those things very much written with that in mind. As Hollywood continues to discourage original work and scramble for adaptations with an existing audience.. even more astonishing if it doesn't land in the next few years. Someone will realize they can get the ready-player audience and the cyberpunk 2077 audience without paying big royalties

by ian_j_butler

5/16/2026 at 4:11:37 PM

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.

by FiatLuxDave

5/16/2026 at 9:39:00 PM

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.

  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...

by underlipton

5/18/2026 at 4:37:39 AM

The Pantheon animated series is pretty amazing. I enthusiastically second that recommendation.

by BLKNSLVR

5/17/2026 at 2:24:35 AM

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.

by Apocryphon

5/16/2026 at 5:56:11 PM

StarMaker is awesome but really exhausting to read.

by aeve890

5/16/2026 at 4:05:43 PM

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.

by jodrellblank

5/16/2026 at 2:12:54 PM

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

by jahala

5/16/2026 at 5:38:08 PM

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.

by msh

5/16/2026 at 3:41:03 PM

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.

by rbanffy

5/16/2026 at 9:15:41 PM

[dead]

by picsao

5/16/2026 at 5:19:10 PM

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!

by moritzwarhier

5/16/2026 at 3:50:39 PM

Charlie has said repeatedly that this is SF-horror, not a How-To.

by dsr_

5/16/2026 at 3:56:18 PM

"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"".

by jodrellblank

5/17/2026 at 8:40:04 AM

'Torment Nexus' moment.

by N_Lens

5/16/2026 at 12:19:40 PM

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.

by okonomiyaki3000

5/16/2026 at 3:48:36 PM

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.

by XorNot

5/16/2026 at 4:52:03 PM

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.

by jeingham

5/16/2026 at 1:42:50 PM

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?

by yomismoaqui

5/16/2026 at 2:55:00 PM

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.)

by GolfPopper

5/16/2026 at 8:38:53 PM

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.

by Ogre

5/16/2026 at 2:24:12 PM

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.

by veidr

5/16/2026 at 6:14:01 PM

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.

by derektank

5/18/2026 at 3:14:46 AM

I wish I had read Deepness first as Fire sort of spoils it (granted, either direction will spoil some things)

by dooglius

5/17/2026 at 11:14:46 AM

That is probably true, and I was assuming that if you read A Deepness in the Sky, you would go on to read A Fire Upon the Deep.

But I got it backwards. While A Deepness in the Sky is set earlier than A Fire Upon the Deep, it was actually published later, as a prequel.

So I agree. Read the first-published one, and if you like it, read the other.

by veidr

5/16/2026 at 1:46:26 PM

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.

by flir

5/16/2026 at 2:06:59 PM

> Nobody's exactly like Banks though.

Indeed. He died way too early. R.I.P.

by generic92034

5/17/2026 at 7:46:43 PM

> Alastair Reynolds

Love Reynolds, but unfortunately he is not half as a good writer as Banks. Then again, not many are.

Reynolods books are full of cool ideas though.

by gpderetta

5/16/2026 at 3:02:15 PM

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.

by caconym_

5/17/2026 at 10:23:52 AM

Reynolds' Aurora trilogy (of Revelation Space - Aurora Rising, Elysium Fire, Machine Vendetta) hits very close.

by watt

5/16/2026 at 2:36:41 PM

Tell Claude that it’s a Culture Mind. Entertaining for a little while.

by synack

5/17/2026 at 6:29:52 AM

Dennis E. Taylor’s “Bobiverse” series is goofy, yet hard, SF about a guy (Bob) whose uploaded mind gets sold when the cryogenic hosting company goes out of business. Given a job piloting a deep space probe, he starts replicating and exploring the galaxy.

by cpeterso

5/17/2026 at 9:01:18 PM

The stuff by Peter Watts, Blindsight and so on, is fun.

by ngvrnd

5/17/2026 at 10:22:23 AM

try M. John Harrison - he has similar command of the word. His Kefahuchi Tract trilogy (Light, Nova Swing, Empty Space).

by watt

5/16/2026 at 2:15:57 PM

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.

by mpalmer

5/16/2026 at 12:32:23 PM

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.

by clokkz

5/17/2026 at 3:18:22 AM

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.

by keeda

5/17/2026 at 7:44:33 PM

> That was an extremely cool but a very far-off, not-in-my-lifetime Sci-Fi fantasy idea when I read it.

The Future Shock is real!

by gpderetta

5/16/2026 at 12:44:07 PM

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.

by losvedir

5/17/2026 at 7:58:04 AM

He writes that the book was written in 5 years and it is a personal record; does anyone know if that means a record slow or a record fast?

by low_tech_love

5/16/2026 at 3:37:31 PM

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).

by murmansk

5/16/2026 at 4:03:38 PM

I just reread Daemon and Freedom™. Highly recommended. They definitely hit different today than when I first read them in 2010 or thereabouts

by solstice

5/16/2026 at 12:48:52 PM

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.

by wainstead

5/16/2026 at 1:12:01 PM

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.

by fellowmartian

5/16/2026 at 3:01:13 PM

That’s because the lobsters were an AI using an LLM to communicate. All we have is the LLM.

by db48x

5/17/2026 at 5:02:52 AM

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?

by joshka

5/16/2026 at 12:15:49 PM

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.

by xgbi

5/16/2026 at 1:15:29 PM

I'm happy to report that my timing attacks have succeeded in accessing this simulation's substrate. Lobsters are reviewing my paper.

by Hizonner

5/16/2026 at 2:05:18 PM

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.

by thom

5/17/2026 at 7:51:59 AM

I feel the need to link the top level comment[0] the venerable cstross posted the time I submitted the same link a few years ago.

I also want to quote a comment of his on THIS posting of the link[1], just because he said he is chill being quoted on his referenced comment.

And finally, I want to state here that I fullheartedly agree with aforementioned comment and I too crave a banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism future.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828666

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163649

by zxexz

5/16/2026 at 7:20:04 PM

If you like this, also worth checking out Greg Egan’s books. He wrote Diaspora. Great read.

by logicalappeals

5/16/2026 at 5:25:14 PM

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.

by warumdarum

5/16/2026 at 6:14:56 PM

What makes them "modern"?

by floren

5/17/2026 at 12:21:30 PM

They are annoying one dimensional stereovtypes of ideologic representations more interested in preaching through cliched interactions , then in beeing believable characters. They have no rea agency, no believable human interests, they behave illogical to drive the plot. Any sane human beeing would have fled the solar system and joined the other (bio)logical beeings waging war on the matroshkas.

by warumdarum

5/16/2026 at 10:22:58 PM

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..."

by zetalyrae

5/17/2026 at 9:08:44 AM

At the time I devoured the work in one sitting with great delight. Today, the libertarianesque naivete detracts from the story a bit.

by red75prime

5/16/2026 at 2:59:55 PM

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.

by lbrito

5/16/2026 at 4:12:37 PM

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

by amanaplanacanal

5/16/2026 at 7:59:17 PM

"weird" sex stuff is just a mild femdom. Totally side thing, IMO just a vehicle to add a layer of ambiguity to the MC.

by subscribed

5/17/2026 at 6:01:11 AM

The end of Chapter 1 is a rape scene, I wouldn't call it "mild". I imagine it can be difficult to read for many people.

by perennate

5/16/2026 at 6:23:05 PM

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.

by TFNA

5/16/2026 at 12:09:46 PM

Is this a post because of the fact it was released under CC or for a different reason?

by ktallett

5/16/2026 at 12:28:58 PM

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

by stoneman24

5/16/2026 at 12:34:03 PM

one of my all time fav sci-fi novels.

by senectus1

5/16/2026 at 12:11:02 PM

Becoming more real every day

by arisAlexis

5/16/2026 at 9:40:29 PM

[dead]

by jmacc93

5/17/2026 at 6:00:42 AM

[dead]

by field_reader