Our Dehumanized Future
Blindsight (Firefall #1) by Peter Watts
It is the late 21st century, and humanity is already being pushed off the stage. Artificial intelligence has rendered a great many human beings excess to requirements. Those who want to remain employed must resort to bizarre augmentations and brain surgeries to stay competitive. As a result, biologists have transformed themselves to interface directly with sensors and distribute the minds across the equipment. Linguists may undergo brain surgery to divide their brains into different units so new minds can share the body and process information in parallel. Synthesists exist to translate bleeding-edge science down to a common denominator that non-specialists can understand, but the synthesists never actually understand the substance of what they are translating.
The rest of humanity is either on welfare or is moving to “heaven,” a virtual reality for their minds, while their bodies are warehoused.
In short, while the human race may be holding out, notwithstanding a demographic collapse in the birth rate, it has been divided into two camps: “ghosts in the machine” without causal effect on reality and zombies carrying out assignments either without or with limited human awareness.
And that was before the aliens took a snapshot of Earth in the Firefall.
As a result of this mysterious event, Siri Keeton awakens on the ship “Theseus” after five years of hibernation in the Oort cloud, facing an immense alien structure being constructed around a sub-Jovian gas giant. Siri is a synthesist who lost the value of empathy as a child when half of his brain was removed to stop epileptic seizures. He is a high-functioning autistic who interacts with other people by miming their behavior. He’s accompanied by a linguist whose brain has been reconstructed to house four other persons, a cyborg military specialist, and a biologist whose control over his own body has been compromised by his augmentation for working through his instruments. There is also a vampire captain.
Wait. What???
Apparently, vampires were a real thing in human prehistory. They were smarter, stronger, and faster than humans and required a chemical in human flesh to survive. In order to avoid over-predation of humans, they learned to hibernate for decades. Unfortunately, they had a brain glitch that sent them into seizures when they saw a right angle, which never happens in nature but which became common when humans began building cities. So, they went extinct, but by the magic of genetics, their genes were reconstructed, and the species was resurrected (with the need for human flesh omitted, but the predator instincts and the “cruciform glitch” kept.)
I thought that was the weirdest and unnecessary element of the book when it was introduced, but as the book progressed, it made sense in the context of the book’s themes of a dehumanized near future.
The crew attempts to communicate with the strange structure, which calls itself “Rohrschack,” but nobody’s home.
Wait. What??? No one’s home, and it gave itself a name????
At this point, the author, Peter J. Watts, moves into a lot of really great “philosophy of mind” stuff.
It turns out that whoever is building Rohrschack is a “Chinese Room.” The Chinese Room thought experiment was developed by philosopher John Searle to explain that AI that passes the Turing Test may not actually be sentient. The AI system may just be operating according to a very advanced recipe of giving outputs in response to different inputs that make sense to the recipient of the outputs but which the system does not comprehend or understand. The parallels to Siri are apparent, but there are also parallels to vampires, who exist in a “half-dreaming” state closer to their predatory role, where they constantly calculate costs and benefits without a moral overlay.
The Theseus crew eventually discovers living entities aboard the Rohrschack, which should not be intelligent but which are clearly much smarter than humans on an individual basis. This leads to speculation among the crew that the aliens have sacrificed self-consciousness as unnecessary to the evolutionary imperative of survival.
While all this philosophy is going on, the action never stops. This book is a page-turner. I became invested in the characters for all their autistic weirdness.
Ultimately, the book concludes with the unsettling notion that perhaps consciousness is a losing proposition and that vampires are the future.
This is a very good book [1]
[1] The title “blindsight” references a condition where people with sight believe they are blind but are still able to navigate rooms and catch things thrown at them while still believing they are blind. I suspect Watts intends the title to reference the problems of consciousness compared to the non-conscious mind’s ability to act without conscious thought.
