Accelerando

Just started reading it today, free download, good.

"I work for the betterment of
everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It's the agalmic future. You're still locked
into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn't a problem
anymore - it's going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as
much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found signs of smart matter -
MACHOs, big brown dwarfs in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared - suspiciously high
entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like seventy percent of the baryonic mass of the M31 galaxy
was in computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, when the photons we're seeing now set out. The
intelligence gap between us and the aliens is a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us
and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that means?"
Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread, then graces him with a slow, carnivorous stare. "I don't care: It's too
far away to have any influence on us, isn't it? It doesn't matter whether I believe in that singularity you keep
chasing, or your aliens a thousand light-years away. It's a chimera, like Y2K, and while you're running after it,
you aren't helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and that's what I care about. And before you say I
only care about it because that's the way I'm programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you think I am.
Bayes' Theorem says I'm right, and you know it."