One Half a Manifesto, written by computer scientist Jarod Lanier in 2000.
Concerns AI-utopianism and nanotech, the sectors of society who are most enthusiastic about them and what their wider ideological motivations are, discussing the anti-human aspects of these futuristic visions as well as providing several refutations of optimistic predictions.
I'm not at all equipped to assess the validity or not of most of these claims, but it's an interesting look into the field and the mentalities of people who work there (even if only from one person's perspective, but he's not the only one). I will probably have reason to come back to it. It's pretty funny too.
I once suggested that among all humanity, one could only definitively prove a lack of internal experience in certain professional philosophers.
It is perfectly true that one can think of a person as a gene's way of propagating itself, as per Dawkins, or as a sexual organ used by machines to make more machines, as per McLuhan (as quoted in the masthead of every issue of Wired Magazine), and indeed it can even be beautiful to think from these perspectives from time to time. As the anthropologist Steve Barnett pointed out, however, it would be just as reasonable to assert that "A person is shit's way of making more shit."
Just as some newborn race of superintelligent robots are about to consume all humanity, our dear old species will likely be saved by a Windows crash. The poor robots will linger pathetically, begging us to reboot them, even though they'll know it would do no good.
There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than a life lived inside the confines of a theory.