[Book Review] Accelerando
How a vision corporate finance and cybernetics oddly predicted the application of AI models
Accelerando is a 2005 novel by Charles Stross. Upon first reading the book, I thought it short-sighted as far as cyberpunk future-fiction went. The author was enthralled by turn-of-the-millennium computational hype. I initially considered Charles Stross blinded by those optimistic and fanciful notions. Fantastical projections of a world with microcomputers embedded into furniture and paper towels, intelligent robot pets, and general artificial intelligences turned me off pretty quickly. Reexamining the text now, there are important ideas discussed, I’d missed the trees for the forest.
The book itself is the story of a family line as the solar system comes alive with digital technology. The story begins slowly, with cypher punks in the mid 2010s and quickly expands to a century of human development. Digital technology becomes ubiquitous, self-governing corporate legal entities become the engines of enormous economic change. Mere humans begin upgrading themselves to keep up with the rapid pace of technological development until our creations effectively leave behind their biological makers. It’s a story of a dynasty rising and falling over the course of the 21st to 23rd century as technology runs away from its creators.
As any reader well knows, the twenty first century has turned out differently. This decade has seen a partial stagnation in computational technology and only limited AI development. Moores Law is failing as it runs into thermodynamic and quantum limits. Diminishing returns and all that. The world projected by the cypherpunks of the early 2000’s lays bare the anti-establishment self-aggrandizement of Generation X. Still, there are several a few important points made by the text. Points that seem to accurately be represented in our world mired in AI and different type of social revolution.
The first prediction is social: Generation X, and Millennials built a system that at first projected an air of frontier wilderness where people could speak and think freely and build new worlds for themselves. That system, as beautiful as the dream was, instead became corrupted and used as a mechanism of authoritarian control. Charles Stross seemed to understand that digital technology is a double edged sword, that his generations naïve dreams might quickly become a nightmare of mass-data and social control. In our age everything said is monitored and corporate AI predict human behavior with algorithmic precision. It was the dream of liberty that led to the globalist neoliberal progressives crushing individuality and expression beneath a managerial boot. As awkward as the fiction is, it represents the inevitable decline and centralization of power into law and corporate authority.
The second prediction made is highlighted several paragraphs above: self governing digital legal entities. For a book written in 2005, this sounds starkly similar to what we now call smart contracts, as managed by AI. The whole thing somewhat resembles non-fungible-token(NFTs) bubble in 2021 but with self-governing digital legal entities. Though in our future such things remain less ubiquitous, confined to comparatively sluggish thermodynamically restrictive devices and AI systems. The idea that all things, data and physical, can be subjected to some form of commodification is still a reality of this century. Imagine runaway AI systems trading non-fungible data and commodities futures on Wall Street. What that might look like for the everyday man as ones’ entire life is commodified, scripted, and traded on the market.
In the book there is a concept referred to as “economics 2.0” an environment where novelty, data, physical assets, and legal entities all get rolled into a sort of digital super-economy. Human minds are neither intelligent enough, nor fast enough to make use of economics 2.0. Thus humans are relegated to a sort of underclass that exists beneath the artificial digital economic hegemonies whose only purpose is to secure more profit. Not entirely different from the way modern bureaucracies treat their human components. Corporations retool their own AI to engage in economics 2.0. Shortly thereafter, they find that paying human salaries is a financial waste. All transactions take place in digital space. The solar system stagnates as innovation becomes limited by short term profit-margins. Short term now meaning less quarterly, and more daily as the pace of commodities trading and speculation accelerates.
These gigantic AI systems are designed to market trade and have a hard time understanding the nature of non-digital spaces. The result is that while market trading accelerates, the human salaries weren’t entirely useless after all. Maintenance is neglected and mining and infrastructure development slow. Economic stagnation occurs because the bureaucratic corporate systems are interested in winning the speculation game to the exclusion of all else. There is no method of ensuring that roads get paved. The underpinning social and physical needs of civilization get ignored and the economy stagnates… this makes the corporate entities even more competitive and even less interested in dedicating any of their capacity to useless things like basic maintenance. It’s a paperclip maximizer problem… but where the hypothetical AI system is interested in gaining profits in market-trading to the exclusion of the actual infrastructure and industry that makes up the productive half of financial systems. The text posits that a decaying state of digitally driven AI speculative trading may be the end-state for all technological civilizations.
The results are dystopic and post-apocalyptic without there ever having really been an apocalypse. Merely a slow unchecked decay.
Image from The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
While somewhat hyperbolic, it makes an interesting case study. The appearance of AI, NFTs, and the commodification of data has itself created an entirely new (highly speculative and unstable) series of markets entirely disconnected from physical reality. We’re seeing an age where individuals who do not commodify their lives fall behind. We’re living through an era where infrastructure is deprioritized in favor of bureaucratic bloat and arcane financial architecture. This ultra-commodification of all aspects of life today seems dangerously reminiscent of economics 2.0 and leaves me concerned for the future. Either high-tech systems stagnate and the economic system collapses and restructures, or high-tech systems don’t stagnate and every ones life is forcibly restructured by digital overlords. Or both.
I do recommend the book if you have the time and interest. There remains an all important fact that the author fails to understand. Charles Stross is steeped in Gen-X culture. Concepts of cultural stability, legality, and neoliberalism run deep in the text. It is a normalcy bias in the text easily overlooked. That bias, however, is the difference between a despotic future of self-governed AI overlords and reality. In the book Accelerando, every one is worried about laws, lawsuits, and threats of legal censure. Entire economics 2.0 entities are self-adaptive to adverse legal conditions… but at no point does any character, organization, or group make a statement equivalent to: “I don’t care what the law is, I have the gun and you don’t.” More than once in the book I realized that a problem could be easily solved by a well placed bullet or missile.
The Gen-X propensity for neoliberal legalities and cultural stabilities is blind to the fundamental recourse of all human civilization: Violence. When the chips are down, it’s the guy with the gun who makes the rules, the guy who can execute violence most efficiently. I hope that our AI overlords at google and amazon have made the same miscalculation: building models that assume an underlying stability in our cultural ecosystem. Otherwise we may well be screwed.
I’d rather be a man among the ruins than a slave to the inhuman whims of corporate AI and crypto-market fluctuations.