What a great book. I love it because even though everything in it is currently future-tech, almost everything seems almost within reach. It all seems so plausible.
"My opinions have shifted in the past 10-15 years and I now think that permitting autonomous corporations to exist -- or even continuing the doctrine of corporate personhood -- are a terrible idea for humanity (because they're effectively AIs that compete with us, and not in a good way)."
Rats! I was going to make the Accelerando connection too! While we are on the subject of being outcompeted, Saturn's Children is also a pretty good read.
"A society that runs on robot slaves who are, nevertheless, intelligent by virtue of having a human neural connectome for a brain, is a slave society ... The human society underpinning "Saturn's Children" got into bad trouble, relying on robot slaves as labour and disappearing up its own arse in the pursuit of virtual luxury."
