The White Stuff by Peter F. Hamilton and Graham Joyce

This is a funny little story about a bunch of low end kids finding a way of letting everyone build whatever electronic device they want for almost free. The lead character is a broker, getting more and more terrified about how this simple thing destroys markets and the capitalist economy. In the end, he is to be replaced by electronic neural networks that perform flawlessly.

It seems Peter Hamilton has some issues with capitalism as there are always some characters criticising it in his books. However, in this particular story, the ending can be only one, where humans are completely replaced by the low cost electronics. It does not destroy communism, it replaces humanity.

My guess is that this is bound to happen sooner or later. Already software glitches are more frequent than hardware ones. When is someone going to realize that we, humans, have the worst hardware possible, even by biological standards. And we're only getting fatter, slower and less efficient by the day. Would I mind being replaced by a race of star faring robotic human replicas? No way.