Good to see this out. The French Touch and Michael Bishop are exciting. The Warpath and Humanis chapters are also great, but my versions would have been written very differently. I particularly like 0rkCE0's thread in the HP chapter.
The French Touch is a fun one, I did not write it (it's from the same author as the Marianne chapter in Null Value and of Néo-Révolution), but I did help with some of the research in the background and identify who is part of the FT... mostly to help us write
La France des ombres.
Warpath was my contribution. On one hand I wanted to consolidate all the pieces of lore we had since SR2 that was sprinkled all over the place, then on the other hand, now that the UCAS was brought low(ish) offer possibility of what they are looking to do to push to agenda... as well as to deal with the internal politics.
Out of sincere curiosity, how would you have tackled Warpath?
Convergence was my pitch, but obviously not my contribution. The only thing I will say is that, in Shadowrun, those with power use magic, the Deep Resonance, the Dissonance, cybernetics (in the most abstract definition of Cyber) to predict and shape the future. The single greatest obstacle has always been a combination of bandwidth and bias - there's too much information, and too many known and unknown biases shaping how information is produced and consumed. Convergence may have found a way around or through that obstacle, or at the least, found a better solution than anyone else has yet to achieve. At the same time, everyone else Shadowrunners worry about or should worry about is still grinding on as-is and is looking for better fixes with the goal of figuring out what the optimally predictable future will be and controlling that as much as possible. Convergence is basically Google in 1998. It's the best-working search engine in a sea of them. The difference is that IRL, Yahoo! and AltaVista wouldn't have murdered you for getting in their ways.
That is both interesting and frightening. We've always been warned of the danger of the rise of the Machine/AI never of the rise of our search engine.