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.