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?

Read this post, have a conversation, or don’t. It’s really not up to you anyway.

Want to get really philosophical? How about having the argument to end (or begin) all arguments: Do we really even have free will?

For context, there is a growing amount of real neuroscience that says… we kind of don’t. Or it would seem that way, based on the fact that our bodies seem to act before our “thoughts” are enacted in our brains. And that’s only one piece of the puzzle. This Atlantic article goes into more of the science:

The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

…

Yes, indeed. When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. When given an opportunity to steal—to take more money than they were due from an envelope of $1 coins—those whose belief in free will had been undermined pilfered more. On a range of measures, Vohs told me, she and Schooler found that “people who are induced to believe less in free will are more likely to behave immorally.”

…but also makes plain that to a certain degree, the same scientists who are disproving free will are in a way saying, “please do not act as if this truth we’re discovering is actually true.” They know that if we throw the premise of will out the window, life fundamentally changes, not necessarily for the better.

If your life is a series of reactions to the world that aren’t really up to you, can you be blamed for doing wrong?

How would thinking of the world this way totally rearrange how we think about people who commit crimes, or are just jerks? Or of good people who are kind and generous?