Stealing Worlds

"Stealing Worlds" is the latest by Karl Schroeder, 2019, 311 pages. This is 1 of those books where I'm going "I have been waiting so long for this book." A very near future, with ideas on tech to use to escape from ever-rapacious capitalism, 80-90% of which are or could be in place nowish.

Schroeder has touched on some of these topics in his earlier works (see here for example), but this seemed to pull everything together. The infodump by one of the characters that makes up most of Chapter 14 represents that synthesis.

The only tech he uses that we are still reaching for is AI. But the AIs he described are not particularly ineffable, and may be within reach of big-data based systems.

I liked his concept of distributed autonomous corporations (DACs) - a corporation with no human employees, run completely by an AI. The owner gets all the profits - the very essence of capitalism? I also really liked his concept of a cryptocurrency that automatically redistributes from wallets that are too full to wallets that are empty - gotta love that outside-the-box thinking. And he again talks about thalience.

I really think we should get Schroeder, Cory Doctorow, & Kim Stanley Robinson together to design the future for us - the Green New Deal writ large. Can we get to a post-capitalist, post-scarcity utopia before the out-of-control paperclip-optimizing AI aka capitalism finishes turning the entire world into paperclips capital?