Singularity Sky

Phones rain down from the sky. Pick one up and a voice offers to grant you any wish you like, in exchange for information. Any information: your grandmother's fairy tales, the schematics of a steam boiler, doesn't matter. That's Charles Stross's Singularity Sky, written in 2003 and highly recommended if you're into hard SF. It remains one of the best pictures of the technological singularity I've come across.

The same thing is happening now, except everyone already owns a phone, and the harvesting has a name: tokenization.

The recent flap over Chinese providers reselling Claude tokens at a quarter of list price tells you where the real value sits. Not in the compute. In the information.

And it isn't only your conversations getting tokenized, it's the job itself. Emad Mostaque, co-founder of Stability AI, puts it plainly: "Every email you write, every Slack message, every document you edit... your company's systems are recording all of it. Your work patterns are training your replacement right now."

So the phones have landed and the wishes are being taken. Just don't expect the book's happy ending, the collapse of totalitarian regimes and a post-scarcity economy. The wishes will be granted, all right. Just not yours. The CEOs' ones.