Fifteen years ago, I interviewed Charlie Stross about a short story called “Lobsters.”
This spring, a thousand people queued outside Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters to raise one.
June 2011, Singularity 1 on 1. Back then, “singularity” was a word most people filed under astrophysics, not #AI. Charlie’s 2001 story “Lobsters,” which grew into Accelerando, was one of the sharpest early maps of what happens when intelligence stops being exclusively biological. Uploaded minds. Post-scarcity economics. Legal personhood for software. An economy run by optimization processes no human fully follows.
He wrote it six years before the iPhone.
Now look at 2026. OpenClaw, the open source agent built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, now at OpenAI, became the fastest-growing project in GitHub history. In China, installing it is called 养龙虾, “raising lobsters,” after the red logo. Shenzhen, Wuxi and Changshu rushed out subsidy packages. Retirees, schoolkids and office workers lined up for help. A grey market of house-call technicians appeared within days.
Any connection to Charlie’s story? None. The logo is a claw pun on Claude.
And yet.
Stross did not predict OpenClaw. He predicted the kind of world in which something like OpenClaw becomes inevitable. Where autonomous agents leak out of labs into hundreds of millions of hands in a matter of weeks. Where the How sprints ahead of the Why and the What. Where the rest of us are left doing the philosophy in public, at scale, without a draft.
That is why I keep going back to this conversation. Great #ScienceFiction is not about the gadgets. It hands us vocabulary for futures that have not arrived yet. Charlie had the words 25 years ago.
We are only now learning to pronounce them.
Watch the full interview, then tell me what he got wrong.
Full video and audio: [ https://snglrty.co/48ibSHE](https://snglrty.co/48ibSHE)
Want to find out why Charlie Stross thinks that the singularity, if it happens at all, may not leave any room for humans? Check out his interview for www.SingularityWeblog.com