Even more fitting is the part of the story where a collective of uploaded lobster minds are involved. I wonder if that was an inspiration for the "OpenClaw" name somehow or just pure coincidence.

> Malice – revenge for waking him up – sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!” He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him.

https://ucp.dev/ looks an awful lot like the first step towards Economics 2.0

> Corporations are almost entirely run by AI agents, when they sue each other they use AI lawyers and verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds so they're basically constantly suing each other many times a second in an attempt to overwhelm each other's compute resources. -> this looks on track to happen

Woah, sounds dystopian, what gives you the impression that this is on track to happen, is there "AI lawyers" already, or what's going on?

The few times I've read about AI/LLMs being used by lawyers or others in relation to law, it's always about "Someone tried to use AI, AI hallucinated and now the lawyer lost his license" which sounds proper and the "right way" to me.

> and verdicts are delivered by AI courts

Yeah, I don't see that one. I don't see the legal system, the one that has people with guns to back it, giving up authority to an AI or a group of AIs.

> Even after humanity itself is gone, all that's left is FAANG-like corporations competing for profit for eternity.

An example of why those who say "if everybody is jobless, who will buy all the products?" are just showing a lack of imagination.

I'm reading Accelerando at the moment and I kept thinking about The Quantum Thief. I enjoyed the Quantum Thief more, but Accelerando feels more relevant to the current times.

Blindsight's near future predictions are also looking more reasonable (aside from the vampires maybe)

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.

The difference between Manfred and the influencers we have now was that he actually invented things, built things, and brokered huge deals while streaming everything.

For another always-on video glasses treatment, I really liked this short film from 2016: https://vimeo.com/166807261

William Gibson is a fashion writer. He leaned into this further with the Blue Ant series and IMO the books benefited from it.

I think Singularity Skies pales in comparison with the depth and breadth of Accelerando.

Ender's Game and Foundation are timeless classics, and I suspect, Accelerando will eventually become one.

I just reread Daemon and Freedom™. Highly recommended. They definitely hit different today than when I first read them in 2010 or thereabouts

Not quite what you’re requesting but “Across Realtime” by Vernor Vinge explores ideas around the singularity. In particular it contains the short novel “Marooned in Realtime” that is completely mind blowing imo.

A bit old but still very relevant is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants .

Rampant consumerism, a United States so dominated by corporations that there is a senator from Cocoa-Cola, and advertising so aggressive you might even prefer the world we live in... published in 1953.

Toss "Signal to Noise" and "A Signal Shattered" both by Eric S. Nylund into the pot - interesting conceptual things around biotech/selfmodification singularities in addition to the more common computational singularities.

The Neuromancer trilogy is great. At least post-singularity AIs appear to be uninterested in humanity.

Rudy Rucker also has a bunch of brain-benders that bent my brain so hard I can't name them.

Lovestar by Andri Snaer Magnason (2012) is a good story around ubiquitous advertising, remote work, and veneration of Tech Bros and tech in everyday life gone too far.

For one example, if people are in debt, a debt collector is allowed to force their brain implants to take over their body at random to shout advertising jingles at strangers, to pay off the debt with advertising money.

In http://lobste.rs/ the lobsters are us :)

The entire thing is an amazing exploration of how the concept of time becomes a bit meaningless though with those capabilities: traveling at relativistic velocities for hundreds of years? Several of your backups live out whole lives and also a centuries old lawsuit is still in progress and a lawyer is slowly uploading on your laser propulsion source to talk about it. When you get back everyone will still be around because it's also surprisingly hard to actually die anymore.

"After a trillion dollars of investment, we have successfully built the Vile Offspring from Stross's famous 2005 SF-horror "Don't build the Vile Offspring"".

Perhaps this is an early indicator.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approve...

Is it? Literally nothing even remotely similar from the book is happening in reality beyond the lobsters’ broken command of language being similar to early GPTs, but even they seem to have had a better world model than our current SOTA.

Nobody is quite like Banks.

Some of the closest would likely be:

Charles Stross' various SF, especially the space opera-adjacent stuff. (He has an large range. Merchant Princes and Laundry series are good, but not at all along the lines of Banks.)

Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Saga.

Vernor Vinge's three Zones of Though books.

David Brin's Uplift series.

Perhaps Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series.

Max Gladstone's Emperess of Forever shares a similar setting, but is much lighter.

The writing of Gene Wolfe and Tamayn Muir has, I think, much in common with Banks in terms of depth and character, but even though SF they have a very different feel and focus to their works.

And, of course, if you want the original space opera, it might be worth tracking down E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen books. Galactic Patrol and Grey Lensman are the heart of it and ought to be read first. Second Stage Lensman and Children of the Lens are worthy sequels that complete the story. They're pretty breezy reads and very different from Banks in everything but the setting of a galaxy filled with different species, and likely seem somewhat hackneyed now, but they're also the source of most space opera archetypes. (If you think of a space opera trope, it probably came from Lensman. Star Wars is largely a Lensman/Flash Gordon mashup.)

Vernor Vinge has some hits and some misses, but A Deepness in the Sky (best to just take the plunge and read it without googling — it's good either way, but better if you don't even read the back of the paperback).

Then, a bit further afield but for me, at least, exercised what I liked in The Culture series, even though stylistically different: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.

Alastair Reynolds (high-concept space opera, well written), Adrian Tchaikovsky (first contact, aliens, can't write nearly as well as Banks), Neal Asher (AI-run civilisation, inventive nastiness). Nobody's exactly like Banks though.

Echoing others, Reynolds (House of Suns, Pushing Ice, the Revelation Space series), Stross (Accelerando, Glasshouse, and Saturn's Children/Neptune's Brood are my favorites), and Rajaniemi (the Quantum Thief trilogy) scratch roughly the same itch for me.

Tell Claude that it’s a Culture Mind. Entertaining for a little while.

Love the Culture books, wish I could wipe my brain and discover them again.

It's not too much like Banks' stuff, but I must recommend Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Far-future humanity, really interesting ideas re: war, identity, memory and infohazards.

Also if you've not already read Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books, absolutely get on that.

It's been so long since I've read it, I don't even remember weird sex stuff. Time for a re-read I guess

Not sure but one section of the book relates to the establishment of a polity where compute was the underpinnings of the society.

Given the current build out of compute in the real world, there is discussion / speculation about the effects of the rush to an economy heavily based on AI and the costs / benefits of that end state society.

If AI isn’t an bubble based on grift and hype that fizzles out