Charles Stross

Charles Stross (born 1964 in Leeds, based in Edinburgh) is one of Britain’s leading science-fiction writers — author of Accelerando, the Laundry Files series, and Saturn’s Children, and a three-time Hugo Award winner. A former pharmacist and programmer, he has spent decades writing about machine intelligence in fiction while puncturing it in essays on his long-running blog, Charlie’s Diary. He co-wrote the Singularity satire The Rapture of the Nerds with Cory Doctorow.

From slow AIs to snake oil

His famous 2017 Chaos Communication Congress keynote, published as “Dude, you broke the future!”, argued that the truly dangerous artificial intelligences already exist: corporations, “very old, very slow AIs” with non-human goals. When the LLM boom arrived he applied the same skepticism to the machines themselves. In a December 2025 post, “Barnum’s Law of CEOs,” he argued the top-down corporate push to adopt AI exploits a cognitive bias in executives: language models generate plausible-sounding arguments — exactly the currency of the C-suite — while studies showed the tools actually slowing developers down.

In a May 2026 retrospective on his own failed predictions, Stross admitted the one he most regretted missing was LLMs — not as useful technology, but as an investment bubble, a grifter’s paradise, and a corrosive influence on critical thinking, with most people “unable to see past the ELIZA illusion.” He has also skewered the Singularity-and-superintelligence worldview of tech billionaires as a “techno-religion,” arguing they are trying to build the science fiction they grew up reading — including, awkwardly, his own.