Accelerando (2005)
antipope.org185 points by eamag 8 hours ago
185 points by eamag 8 hours ago
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://ucp.dev/ looks an awful lot like the first step towards Economics 2.0
A Google API?
Yes in sense of agents to talk to agents. AI talks to another AI. Out with the humans.
“ 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.
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.
Also, the mc was using python to write his ai scripts, if I remember it correctly.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
For another always-on video glasses treatment, I really liked this short film from 2016: https://vimeo.com/166807261
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!
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
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.
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'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 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.
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.
If you like this, also worth checking out Greg Egan’s books. He wrote Diaspora. Great read.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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"".
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
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.
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.
Becoming more real every day
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
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.
one of my all time fav sci-fi novels.