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Comment by utilityhotbar | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

ha, the "/s" got formatted on to a different line.

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.

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

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!]

> 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 :)

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.

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

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

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

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.

> OpenClaw was OpenClaude

It can still be both.

It was ClawdBot first.

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

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, ..."

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