Hi. I'm Charlie Stross and I wrote *Accelerando*. It was originally a series of novelettes (short stories) written from 1998 through 2003 and published in Asimov's SF Magazine (they racked up five Hugo nominations along the way) before being assembled into a stitch-up novel. So it's earlier than you think ... and a lot less optimistic.
I think you missed a key point which is the narrator is Aineko and Aineko is not a cat. Aineko is an sAI that has figured out that humans are more easily interacted with/manipulated if you look like a toy or a pet than if you...
>I see where you're coming from with the "recreate Christianity" thing. I'm curious what you think it'd look like, to be, like, actually trying to model what the future might look like and prepare for it in some kind of sensible way, that didn't feel that way?
Well, I'm something of a skeptic. (And what we're seeing today is definitely not actual intelligence-in-a-box, it's just a hype bubble being inflated by the usual silicon valley grifters to keep the dollars flowing in from the credulous: I'm pretty certain it's going to burst in the next few ... (read more)