I'd also wager that "I don't know Timmy" is more thematically related. I feel most of the discussion in this thread glosses over what is most unsettling about Permutation City. It isn't just a book about what it could be like to be a simulated mind, it's most deeply about exploring the disquieting metaphysical consequences of computable minds. I can't think of a story that has as thoroughly scattered my basic grasp of reality as this one. Only Blindsight even begins to comes close. In "I don't know Timmy" there's a sequence that goes: "Well, we can't exactly turn it off." "Why not?" asked…
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." - Corollary to Clarke's Law Also, on the topic of advanced civilizations being coy: > "Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own…
The Freeze-Frame stories are officially called the Sunflower series. While different, they have the same alien creepiness that Watts is so good at, the extreme time frame (millions of years) makes it all the more chilling. It's a novel plus one prequel short story ("Hotshot"), two sequels ("The Island" and "Giants"), and two short fragments. All the shorts can be found on his web site, I believe. I also really enjoyed Echopraxia, the sequel to Blindsight. I think some people thought it was too different from what they expected; it doesn't pick up Siri Keaton's story, but tells a vaguely…
Rather presupposes that alien life is similar enough to humanity for culture and art to be more-or-less mutually intelligible. Would extraterrestrials who communicate with pheremones, or touch, or don't communicate at all (ala "Blindsight") have any concept of music? If they can "hear", does their sensory range overlap ours? Is it compatible with our notion of musical scales? Does whatever passes for a nervous system operate at a similar timescale to ours? Food and clothing seem like more of a stretch- even within earth's biosphere many substances humans can eat are poisonous to other…
I read the article properly and came to the same conclusion. The author (of the article, unsure of the book) is definitely arguing that Progress is a flawed concept because of the frailty of human nature. Genetic alteration and controlled environments might help solve these issues and help overcome the "human nature sucks" argument against the idea of Progress. But maybe the problem is more universal than human nature. One could argue that we become "less" human by attempting to make ourselves less irrational or prone to being negatively effected by our environment with the endpoint being…
Disclaimer: I've read and enjoyed most of his books and short stories, but Egan's not for everyone. He favors ideas and world-building over characters and storytelling. I most like Egan when he avoids math and goes to a dark, cynical place. His short story The Extra[1] is probably the best example. If you like The Extra, you'll probably enjoy Blindsight by Peter Watts[2]. Some of the late Ian M. Banks titles fit as well: Against a Dark Background and Matter are both grim, somewhat hard sci-fi. If you're a fan of Greg Egan, you'll likely enjoy Ted Chiang[3]. He doesn't write much, but he…
Pretty much everything about the premise seems silly to me. A civilization that can unwrap protons and build machines that violate energy conservation inside of them wouldn't need to care about taking over other species as basically all the material and energy of any solar system, regardless of whether it had life in it or not, would be available to them. And if you could build such objects you could probably find a better way to destroy our enemies than fiddling with their particle accelerators. The Dark Forest idea is also very dumb. The universe is so stupidly big that going out of your…
Blindsight by Peter Watts. Not exactly answering questions on what AIs would do but: to spoil as little as possible: there is an alien ship that communicates with humanity in a way that is eerily parallel and similar to today's LLMs. It's a pretty tough read though, I had hard time understanding what is happening exactly. Might be one of the books where it might be a good idea to spoil a bit how the narrative works. Maybe just reading to top tagline on TvTropes page doesn't spoil too much: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Blindsight Also you can read it online easily:…
Peter Watts. http://www.rifters.com/crawl/ Specifically, Blindsight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) > Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor Books in 2006. It garnered nominations for a Hugo Award for Best Novel, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and a Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The novel follows a crew of astronauts sent out as the third wave, following two series of probes, to investigate a trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt comet dubbed 'Burns-Caulfield' that has been…
> This is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat That does not follow at all. It's _likely_ that life elsewhere would be carbon-based since carbon is so useful and common. It is not a requirement. Silicon has been proposed as a replacement. While not as flexible as carbon, it's pretty close. Silicon-based lifeforms wouldn't be "organic" at all. Even if we just stick to carbon, there are many organic compounds (and lifeforms) that aren't anything close to what we would consider 'meat'. We are working with N=1. Until we find more…