Ray Nayler (MCD Books)
WHAT is consciousness and why are we so obsessed with it? We want to understand it in ourselves, we speculate about 鈥� or doubt 鈥� its existence in others, we look for it in other species and we are even trying to author our own version of it in artificial intelligence.
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Full disclosure: in all my years as a science journalist, I could never quite get my head around the so-called hard problem of consciousness. I could recite the theories, but it wasn鈥檛 until I read Ray Nayler鈥檚 The Mountain in the Sea that I truly understood it in my bones. This book has many layers. It has the clothes of a futuristic eco-punk or cyberpunk thriller, the guts of a philosophy seminar and the soul of a religious tract.
The thriller: Nayler鈥檚 book is a speculative science-fiction novel set in a quasi-dystopian future around the Con Dao archipelago off the coast of Vietnam. This area has recently been established as the last sanctuary for the world鈥檚 marine species after automated fishing vessels 鈥� proper sea monsters: murderous, enormous and driven by an internal logic, created by us, with a hunger that can never be sated 鈥� have reduced our oceans to biological deserts. These craft still roam the world, as dangerous for humans as they are for the few fish that remain. In the Con Dao protectorate, marine biologist Ha Nguyen and an advanced android intelligence called Evrim work together to study the local octopuses, which may have achieved not only consciousness, but much more besides. Can they understand these creatures before the sea monsters break through?
The philosophy: With the sole exception of Evrim, the futuristic AIs in Nayler鈥檚 book are driven by a simplified caricature of human consciousness. And what an indictment they are. Our own human consciousness makes us wired for extraction. 鈥淗umans can only do what we are capable of,鈥� Nayler鈥檚 characters repeat more than once. 鈥淎ll we have is taken from someone else,鈥� is another refrain. Horrors ensue when the AI mimics turn their eyes on humans to see precisely what we are for, and what we can be put into the service of.
If this sounds like a familiar plot 鈥� and it has been an obsession in recent history, from The Matrix to The Terminator 鈥� Nayler quickly turns its conventions upside down and inside out, asking why we are so drawn to the narrative of AIs rising up to rain judgement on us, their creators. He finds the answer not in our fear of AI-borne judgement, but in our longing for it. Deep down, we wish for something else to take over and force us to stop ruining the world. We want to be judged, and to be forgiven. We want someone better than us to be in charge.
The tract: In short, the search to understand human consciousness and the urge to create a silicon version stem from a common root: a tacit admission that there is a flaw in our operating system and that we can鈥檛 keep going the way we have been. Nayler explores in staggering detail why this means human consciousness needs to evolve beyond separate brains floating in individual vats.
Seven-and-a-half billion of these isolated brain vats have already begun affecting the world as if they were a single mega-entity, and a haphazard and destructive one at that. We already operate as a collective intelligence, so the next step in our evolution must be learning to function as a deliberate and benevolent one. Talk about a hard problem.
Sally Adee is a technology and聽science writer based in聽London. Follow her on Twitter @sally_adee
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Paul McAuley (Gollancz)
Intelligent moles, or perhaps badgers, that are living in the legacy of an extinct race of intelligent bears must confront their history. Another take on animal consciousness, maybe. Also heavy on philosophy.
