Accelerando (2005)

If you liked Accelerando (and I sure did!), you may also like Stross's Palimpsest and Glasshouse [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest_(novella)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)

The rougher The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams is also worth trying:

http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

Also A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, and Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series. The latter can be read out of order; I read The Cassini Division before any of the others. Excession by Iain M. Banks is also one of my favorites, though it has a significant learning curve if you haven't read any of his Culture books before. All of these have things to say about runaway technological change and superintelligence. They all have a high "sensawunda" index, for those who recognize this old SF fan term.

[1] I have read and enjoyed most of Stross's output, but it has a lot of thematic variations and someone who loved Accelerando may not care for e.g. Rule 34.

Worth noting the author's warning on TMoPI: "This online novel contains strong language and extreme depictions of acts of sex and violence." This is very much not a routine notice, and it runs the gamut from elder abuse to self-mutilation to suicide to torture to necrophilia to drug abuse to underage sex. It is fascinating, but it is a story of deeply unhealthy people doing deeply unhealthy things.

I say this as someone who appreciated it enough to buy it hardcopy.

> Some of you might assume that, as the author of books like "Singularity Sky" and "Accelerando", I attribute this to an impending technological singularity, to our development of self-improving artificial intelligence and mind uploading and the whole wish-list of transhumanist aspirations promoted by the likes of Ray Kurzweil. Unfortunately this isn't the case. I think transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy. While its adherents tend to be vehement atheists, they can't quite escape from the history that gave rise to our current western civilization. Many of you are familiar with design patterns, an approach to software engineering that focusses on abstraction and simplification in order to promote reusable code. When you look at the AI singularity as a narrative, and identify the numerous places in the story where the phrase "... and then a miracle happens" occurs, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that they've reinvented Christianity.

> Indeed, the wellsprings of today's transhumanists draw on a long, rich history of Russian Cosmist philosophy exemplified by the Russian Orthodox theologian Nikolai Fyodorvitch Federov, by way of his disciple Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose derivation of the rocket equation makes him essentially the father of modern spaceflight. And once you start probing the nether regions of transhumanist thought and run into concepts like Roko's Basilisk—by the way, any of you who didn't know about the Basilisk before are now doomed to an eternity in AI hell—you realize they've mangled it to match some of the nastiest ideas in Presybterian Protestantism.

> If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And if it looks like a religion it's probably a religion. I don't see much evidence for human-like, self-directed artificial intelligences coming along any time now, and a fair bit of evidence that nobody except some freaks in university cognitive science departments even want it. What we're getting, instead, is self-optimizing tools that defy human comprehension but are not, in fact, any more like our kind of intelligence than a Boeing 737 is like a seagull. So I'm going to wash my hands of the singularity as an explanatory model without further ado—I'm one of those vehement atheists too—and try and come up with a better model for what's happening to us.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

I was going to say - that was the part of the book that felt the least plausible when I first read it, but by god, here we are.

I have yet to read Accelerando, but Glasshouse was amazing. It definitely gets my endorsement.

I would further suggest that anyone who likes Glasshouse might like Permutation City by Greg Egan.