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)
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.
A hunter-gatherer dropped into a metropolis where all the logistics has suddenly failed would be as dead as everybody else.
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.
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.
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.
https://books.google.com/books?id=yaHf5PavpB8C&lpg=PA93&dq=%...
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
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...
In which way is this on-track to happen?
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.
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 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.
It’s already a lot closer than I expected to ever experience.
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.
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.
Look for AI arbitration sooner rather than later.
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.
An example of why those who say "if everybody is jobless, who will buy all the products?" are just showing a lack of imagination.
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.
- 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.
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.
We're much close to a dystopian comedy like Brazil than we are to Black Mirror.
> 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.
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 can still be both.
If OpenClaw was an Accelerando reference that's an incredibly deep cut and super cool imo
Not a huge distinction but the origin as regular lobsters feels important to the transhumanism (transcrustaceanism?) theme
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.
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.
Not the first time I've come across great recommendations in the comments of HN!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What I want is Banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism.
(You can quote me on that. I hate what tech has turned into.)
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.
My own list is:
Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon
Counting Heads by David Marusek
Nexus by Ramez Naam
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
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.
Rudy Rucker also has a bunch of brain-benders that bent my brain so hard I can't name them.
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...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.
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
Halting state might be a bit dated but rule 34 absolutely holds up.
Ender's Game and Foundation are timeless classics, and I suspect, Accelerando will eventually become one.
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!
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.
Any recommendations?
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.
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.)
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.
Indeed. He died way too early. R.I.P.
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.
The notion of the inner solar system being converted into computronium sounds less and less far-fetched with each passing month.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approve...
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.
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