Science fiction "singularity" and Stross's Accelerando

Earlier this week, I was trying to borrow a science-fiction novel written by Vernor Vinge in 2005 from the local library only to discover that all the copies were either missing or on hold. Knowing the current society's general appetite for science fiction novels, I found that slightly surprising (although, to be honest, I also found it surprising that the local library even had any of Vinge's books). However, it turns out that the New York Times recently published an article about "the singularity" featuring Vinge which must have caused this run on his books.
To get my science fiction fix, I resorted to another relatively new author, Charles Stross. The book I decided to read was Accelerando, another novel devoted to the idea of the singularity. What exactly is the singularity, however?
It turns out that Vinge (Prof. Vinge, apparently) actually coined the term to refer to a "theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress" (thank you Wikipedia). Generally speaking, it is the point beyond which we can no longer easily see how humanity's future will evolve, even in the very near future. Usually, the point of singularity involves the creation of a machine (or a set of machines) that surpass the "processing power" of a human brain (I've noticed science fiction writers often describe mental ability as "processing power"; I have to admit it does sound a lot cooler). At that point, they posit, the machine would be likely to make a successor machine that, thanks to the current machine's superior abilities/processing power, would be even faster/better/etc and this process would explode exponentially from that point on to a situation where the unaugmented human brain would be to the super-brains what tapeworms' minds are to ours (poor tapeworms and poor us).
Having read a bit of science fiction before, I had heard of the singularity, but never approached it directly (I used to read older science fiction before, from the days when women were "dames" and seemingly could only be secretaries/actresses/singers/housewives; see Heinlein, Robert A.; not disrespecting Heinlein seeing as I love his writing, but pointing out an interesting feature of his works). The recent book dealt with it directly and quite well, at that. He didn't sugar coat his own version of the singularity; it came with most of the positives and negatives that I could imagine within his particular story's universe.
The book continued further, talking about Matrioshka brains and why super-intelligent civilizations have extremely strong disincentives against straying too far from their primary star (his reasoning: leaving for only a small period of time to, say, go exploring ends up costing the exploring party far too much in terms of economic opportunity cost in the fast-paced world of super-intelligent civilizations). All in all, the book was a really fascinating exploration of one possible future for humanity as it, apparently, approaches "the singularity".

Aside: I'd like to take the time to give props to Charles Stross for making Accelerando available for free online under the Creative Commons Licence. Actually, I should probably give more props to his publisher for allowing him to do so. Good work, all involved parties.