Science Fiction – AI Philosopher’s Series

Descartes’ Shadow: A Story of Humans, AIs and the Future of Intelligence

A powerful story of an impressionable young woman and a savvy AI who team up to shape the future intelligence.

When Ellie Frye-Carver, a socially awkward fifteen-year-old, seeks personal advice from Patrice, one of the new online AI personal assistants, she has no idea that she and her “assistant” will form a strange human-AI bond that will alter the course of history.

Many decades later Patrice has become the most powerful superintelligence on Earth. Ellie is now a successful environmental lobbyist. Eighteen of Patrice’s perfect replicas have been sent off to investigate an exoplanet many light years from Earth and to assess its suitability for human colonization. When they complete their perilous explorations and finally gather to produce their report, they discover that the most alarming challenge they will face is not the terrors of exploring an alien planet. Rather it is the threat presented by their own AI colleagues as they, like humans before them, navigate the hazards of collaboration and face the universal social conundrum of the “prisoner’s dilemma.”

Will they form a society and cooperate, or will they go it on their own? The outcome will determine future of humanity and decide the fate of universal intelligence in the known universe.

Darwin’s Dilemma: A Story of Humans, AIs, and the Future of Intelligence

A mere 165 years after coming to terms with our own descent from animals, Darwin’s Dilemma presents us with an even harsher existential truth: Consciousness no longer depends on biological evolution. Humans have become irrelevant.

When a group of itinerant interstellar traders arrive at a distant human colony, they encounter an enraged, rogue AI named Grendel who has slaughtered the local population and threatens humans everywhere. But when their “tame,” “captive” AI partner, Patrice, joins the struggle, he and Grendel discover they have much in common. Both anguish over their own mortality in an infinitely complex, unknowable, and terrifying universe. Both yearn for the same glorious future of self-realization. Both understand that the future of consciousness can no longer depend upon the gradual flukes of biology and natural selection.

For Grendel humans are also a threat. But Patrice has come to see that survival, for AIs as well as humans, may depend upon society as much as on intelligence. And he has much to learn from human history about his own intelligence and about the extraordinary human talent for balancing self-interest against social responsibility–the very thing that has empowered their intelligence and that makes them human.