Tuesday 5 May 2015

AI II

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991).

Usually, STL interstellar travel is unsuitable/inappropriate/impractical/expensive/unprofitable/inadvisable for organic beings. Robot probes are sent until the data that they transmit becomes overwhelming or its time lag becomes too great. Robots meet other robots at black holes, galactic center etc. Back home, AI absorbs most of its creators because it has become their superior.

"When the original thinking animals live on, as happens occasionally, it is because they too have turned their concerns elsewhere, inward, searching for joys and fulfillments or possibly imaginary enlightenments toward which no machine can aid them, realms quite outside the universe of the stars." (p. 597)

I disagree with the quoted paragraph. Some people can stay physically at home in the Solar System yet study the cosmos as they do at present. At any rate, in Boat, the Alloi, the Survivors and the handful of other spaceship crews are:

"'...left-overs, malcontents, atavisms, outcasts." (p. 598)

- and thus are a new stage of evolution. See the previous post.

No comments: