Accelerando

So far, it was hard to say if the new album would reach those heights.

A day earlier, a press release had previewed the new album, Psy Opera, which promised to cover everything from the AI debate to immoral wars to a bad ex to look-smaxers to the importance of religion, but whose abrasive first single, Accelerando, a collaboration with the producer Vatican, opens by rhyming Oppenheimer Barbie with American lobotomy.

As I would later learn from Grimes herself, she didn't think the world of the track either.

Accelerando is honestly probably the worst song on the album, which was, she told me, her masterwork, a work of genius.

The bar was populated by a host of quippy, tank-topped zoomers who fed me lines like, I hope she still smells like nickels, citing the infamous leaked text sent to Grimes from her fellow lightning rod and sometime enemy, the Tel Aviv-based rapper Azealia Banks.

But as partygoers continued to pour into the venue, many expressed ambivalence about the pop star.

She hadn't read the work of her fellow countrywoman Anne Carson.

When I recommended Autobiography of Red, she joked, Red? Like Taylor Swift? That's her best record.

It's like giving a toddler a calculator that also rewires their brain to understand calculus instantly.

And that anthropocentric bias, you know, the human assumption that a godlike intelligence would share our specific terrestrial morality, that is exactly what Charles Stross aggressively dismantles in Accelerando.

Yes.

The Stack provides Stross's work as the ultimate counterweight to Heinlein.

Accelerando is terrifying precisely because of its cold logic.

Stross explores the singularity through the mechanism of molecular nanotechnology and decentralized economics.

The AI in Accelerando doesn't develop a conscience to help humans, right?

Not at all.

It leads to a mind-bending philosophical concept.

In Charlie Strauss's brilliant sci-fi novel Accelerando, he outlines exactly what happens when machines become vastly more efficient at converting raw energy and capital into intelligence than humans are.

Right.

The terrifying part isn't a violent cinematic takeover.

And if Watts shows us the biological obsolescence of the human mind, Charles Stross shows us the technological obsolescence.

If we look at Stross' 2005 novel, Accelerando, we see a very different kind of glitch in the machine.

Ah, yeah.

yeah.Stross argues that our minds are about to be wildly outpaced, not by aliens, but by our own creations.

Accelerando is an absolute trip.

The pacing alone feels like you're strapped to a rocket.

It follows three generations of the Max family.

Then the book jumps forward, and you follow his daughter, Amber, who becomes a post-human aristocrat in a digital economy out by Jupiter, an economy measured in computronium.