> after which everything will become increasingly better, increasingly faster

Stross (the author of Accelerando) thinks the world of Accelerando is exactly the opposite. A bleak terrible world full of horrors where the overwhelming majority of humans have been killed or worse. It is only because the book is written from the perspective of the few survivors that "made it" that it seems more cheery.

See https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-sh...

Choice quotes from the main article and comments:

> In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Cspitalism [sic] eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource -- like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster. > > The logic of exponential progress at a tempo rising to a vertical spike is a logic that has no room in it for humanity.

and

>> [Reader question] I didn't read it that way at all. Are insects extinct? Bacteria? Or even Horseshoe crabs? > > Yup, pretty much. By chapter 8 of "Accelerando", Earth has been destroyed -- broken up to make computronium or other stuff of interest to the Vile Offspring. Those humans who didn't get off the planet or upload their minds ("Accelerando" takes a rather naively can-do approach to uploading) are dead. Ditto the biosphere.