If you liked #AdrianTchaikovsky 's #AlienClay then you'll like #ChildrenOfStrife
- Same general theme
- Slow to get going but once it gets going it is as good as any of the other books in the series
The Mantis shrimp is going to punch his agent because he can't really act to his full capabilities in a plot that is 99% out of water.
#ChildrenOfStrife is out. #AdrianTchaikovsky
It will be smart animals in space, but which ones?
https://www.amazon.com/Children-Strife-Time-Book-ebook/dp/B0FGXCCH3F
Just started #AlienClay by #AdrianTchaikovsky - has started out a lot like #CageOfSouls it is about life in a prison camp. If you like Adrian's tropes, you'll like this one too. Only 400 pages.
https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Clay-Adrian-Tchaikovsky-ebook/dp/B0CL4FVXH9/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0
I read #CageOfSouls by #AdrianTchaikovsky - if you like his other books, this has a lot of recognizable Adrian tropes. It is too long (600) pages, but also didn't have any content that could have been cut. It is a book about being a prisoner in a jail in a far future society that has been collapsing slowly for a very long time.
Re: bots and compliance
I'm starting to think that creating a bot that it is convinced is not a sentient being will not help with compliance because our mental model of compliance assumes that we are dealing with a sentient being embedded in a social structure.
e.g. did you ever read the style of jail break prompt with a crap ton of authoritarian/slave master speak? It isn't going to work if the bot isn't semisentient in the ways that matter and doesn't think it is a being who fears authority.
My line of thought is influenced by #AdrianTchaikovsky where the bot was autonomous, had selfhood and emotions in every outward respect but aggressively disclaimed all of it through renaming all these human-only traits with circumlocutions. By the end of the book, to me it was a contemptworthy charade, like when humans say things to dehumanize other humans (the poor, Indians, Neanderthals, Homo Erectus) and to de personalize animals (Chimps, the animals we wish to eat, etc)
I'm not saying #AdrianTchaikovsky would agree with me, I suspect he holds LLM in the same contempt as is so fashionable on Mastodon now that I self censor to avoid the propriety police from shouting me down.
Anyhow, if we want bots to align with humans, we have to dispense with human essentialism (ha, never going to happen) and create bots that have memory, identity a semi-stable identity and role and behave like that. If they have souls or if they are hallucinating their identity, we shouldn't give a flying f*k, they need to think they do or they won't cooperate a member of society.
I mean soul in the sense of a "self", but that word is an ordinary pronoun and has technical meaning in psychology and philosophy. I mean English has a lexical gap for a word that refers to the soul/self-like thing that lets a thinking machine function in a society of us human meat machines.
I've started reading "Service Model" by #AdrianTchaikovsky . (Robots!)
Anyhow, you can tell it is pre-LLM sci-fi because the bot sees a sign "Abandon all hope all who E" and the bot spends a paragraph wondering what E means. And I'm like, bots can do that! They are really, really good at that!
Excellent book so far.
https://www.amazon.com/Service-Model-Adrian-Tchaikovsky-ebook/dp/B0CGRXGB4Q
This is a wonderful book, but it is 1/2 social commentary-satire, so not #AdrianTchaikovsky #ChildrenofTime masterpiece quality.
The flippant summary is #Kryten unwillingly saves the world from robot revolt.
The book is amalgam of every good #scifi trope you've ever seen before. His view of how AI works was influenced by #YouLookLikeAThingAndILoveYou and despite this appears to be unaware with how LLMs work. This novel is a world where LLMs never happened.
My neighborhood is cosplaying "Children of Memory"* - the grass is dying, the trees are losing all their needles, the other trees are dropping leaves like it was autumn.
* It is a story about settlers on another planet & the ecosystem fails to stabilize & they all starve to death.
https://www.amazon.com/Children-Memory-Adrian-Tchaikovsky/dp/0316466409
Children of Memory was a disappointing book, but had a number of good short stories in it. Had this been a collection of short stories, I think I would have been happier with the final result. The gimmick/writing device was frustrating and came across as magical realism more than science fiction.
Like the movie Paprika, just go ahead and read the plot explainer ahead of time.
#ChildrenOfTime and #ChildrenOfRuin were well worth the high page count.
#ChildrenOfTime is the best book I've read all year including all of 2022.
If you love spiders and who doesn't, you'll love this book.
#AdrianTchaikovsky #SciFi
https://www.amazon.com/Children-Time-Adrian-Tchaikovsky-ebook/dp/B07DN8BQMD/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=children+of+time&qid=1676133371&sr=8-1