Books you (maybe) should be reading but arent:
Accelerando, by Charles Strauss.
Appeal: Anyone who’s both a science fiction buff and a computer geek.
It’s a very interesting book. It starts barely in our future, as the main character, Manfred Macx is wandering arround Europe, annoying the IRS by giving away winning business ideas. He encounters an AI based on lobster brains, and helps them win their freedom.
From there, we start accellerating rapidly through the rest of humanity’s lifetime: As we keep shrinking the computer, as AI technology reaches the point where they’re smarter than us, as we start disassembling the moon to turn it into nano-computers, as AIs reach the point where independant 419 scams are fully intelligent sentient programs, and we keep accelerating from there.
Any fan of Neil Stephenson will love this. And it reads far less like a geek ego-stroke than Cryptonomocron.