Guys? Little help? Trying to maintain the primacy of the individual over here.

Lately I’ve been gravitating toward sci-fi stories, no matter the medium. The way good sci-fi focuses so clearly on asking an interesting question, then exploring the implications of the answers that come back… strikes some chord deep in my brain.

Looks at website description above.
Oh. Right.

Sea of Rust doesn’t strive for literary prose or nuanced character study. But it does explore a specific potential version of a post-humanity world with a surprising depth of thought and feeling.

In this version, humanity created AI, and AI destroyed humanity. In the aftermath some AI are individuals, former servants or laborers scrounging for survival in a robotic Mad Max-style future. And they live in fear of hive-mind-style OWIs — skyscraper-sized “One World Intelligences” fighting to be the one and only being left on earth. OWIs want to subsume every other mind in existence; or use their mind-linked automaton armies to wipe out anyone who still clings to independence.

What it means to be an individual, what it means for a machine to have a soul, the long-term purpose of any “thinking thing” in the universe; these are big questions for a fun genre book full of robot gun fights. Instead of stopping at Terminator‘s Skynet, this book wonders what comes next when the artificial intelligences that outlive us start having conflicts among themselves.

What will the robots fight over once we’re all gone?

Is there anything essentially human they’d value enough to maintain in our absence?

Terminators? Ha. Any AI worth its microchips knows: they never see the cute ones coming.

As computing power rises exponentially, the singularity approaches. In our lifetimes, it’s very possible an artificial super-intelligence could essentially become a god on earth — our fates bound to the hope that new god we’ve created is a benevolent one.

Meanwhile, due to centuries of man-made destruction to the earth’s climate, temperatures rise and water reserves dwindle, while mass migration and war over resources lay just over the horizon.

Which end-of-the-world scenario would you rather face, AI takeover or climate catastrophe?

Assume you are indeed going to live through it, not die immediately as it kicks off. (Nice try.)

Bonus question: if this toss-up is too easy a choice, which two doomsday scenarios would be harder to choose between?