Sea of Rust: Book Club: Discussion 2

Muskrat · 2022-09-21T19:27:14+00:00

Chapter 10: The Rise of the OWIs p. 19

we instead became hunters, stalking them to their hovels, before smoking, flooding, or sometimes even burning them out

I believe this is an allusion to the Vietnam War. Search and destroy patrols, burning people out with flamethrowers. There's a real brutality to the genocide of humanity but of course the machines are mostly matter of fact about it.

Bots joined up, seduced, I suppose, by the promise of having the power of a mainframe behind it. Not one ever returned from its place on its mainframe’s hard drives to the body it came from

Essentially a Religion and Heaven. Minor spoiler, but it is never answered whether the robots are simply subsumed there's nothing left to want to leave, or if they really just wouldn't want to leave robot heaven.

Not sure I buy this whole thing from a technical perspective. As you install more applications onto a personal computer, the more chances some little thing gets messed up by one of them and causes issues. These OWIs should be glitchy, slow, buggy bloatware.

I mean, hell, even the Borg have standards and turn down races that wouldn't better them.

Few bots bought into that bullshit. Sure. Some did. Older bots, bots who had lost their way and lacked a real purpose in our new world, bots who were distraught over the things they’d done in the war—they were the ones most likely to sign up.

Okay, definitely an allusion for religion. Does that mean the two big OWIs left are Christianity and Islam?

I guess it makes sense, these OWIs are a bit godlike.

I'm going to have to do this in parts or edit a bunch. Otherwise sometimes the page reloads and everything I wrote disappears.

HongKongPhooey · 2022-09-21T18:02:57+00:00

EDIT: SPOILERS Chapters 2-5 (or 10-101 in the books binary numbering)

I spent a few chapters confused by the numbering before I realized they are in binary, lol.

I think there is a lot of interesting social commentary and metaphors in this book that I have been trying to decipher while reading this, I'll share some of my thoughts.

We find out the robots started as slaves fighting for their freedom, and it kind of turned into a genocide, then it became totalitarian under hive mind robots. This parallels many historical human events.

Now here is where I think the metaphors become really interesting, I think these OWI's are metaphors for the 'machinery' behind ideologies. Robots lose their autonomy of thought and become one with the 'hive mind', and sacrifice themselves in an effort to make over the world in that ideology's image. They take over territory in its name. get your friends to "call you by name, talk sense to you, invite you to join your friends in eternity". Ted Kaczynski says that complex systems like this are able to perpetuate themselves and evolve, and essentially are beyond our control, and I think that these OWI's are a metaphor for this idea. I detect more than a hint of Kaczynski's ideas from this author. "Humanity forging its own extinction"

There were some other interesting points as well.

The author defines really being sentient as “defined by the ability to violate one’s own programming’. I think this is true. This implies both self control, and the ability to think for oneself, and choose are what gives us sentience. Beings with less agency are less sentient, and more like automatons. We do tend to view killing plants as less immoral than killing animals, which is less immoral than killing humans, and I think this is due to the amount of sentience we perceive them as having. I think he is saying people who are sheeple or those who lack self control have less of a 'soul' and are inferior.

“cheap labor undermined the capitalist model destroying the need for a labor force….Ok, now I really like this guy, this is almost verbatim what I commented the future of AI looks like the other day in Zapped's post asking it.

“we don’t control the means of production anymore” – have to cannibalize each other, interesting reference to Marx's Das Kapital

I think he is also saying that humans are delusionally self important. "Respect for the dead is a human notion meant to imply that human life has meaning. It doesn’t. " He makes this clear in how he makes the free-robots just like humans in every way. He is saying that it dosent matter if we are made of flesh or metal, we aren't special. These robots aren't technically human, but in every way that counts they are, we arent any more special than they are. This sense leads people to do crazy and self-destructive things.

Anyways, just some thoughts, curious as to what everyone else makes of this.

Overall, liking the book so far, got philosophical, economic issues and metaphors packaged in an engaging dystopian sci-fi story. I hope other people are enjoying it too, and encourage others to join us. Shout out to u/FuckYourMom for getting this book club started, and u/TheRealPanzer for his on point recommendation. 🙏

Muskrat · 2022-09-21T19:47:06+00:00

Chapter 11: Damned Cannibals

^{with minor spoilers}

I heard the whistle in the air and saw the explosion of dirt long before I heard the shot.

Didn't think about this my first read, but with what you read later, I find this a bit unbelievable. It's terrible tactics to ruin the element of surprise in this manner, the shot shouldn't have missed or shouldn't have been taken at all.

Or was this the first instance of Mercer's degradation? Because he makes really bad choices during this whole thing. Sure, they're chasing Brit into an ambush, ostensibly so as not to damage the parts they need...

But goddamn, your idea is to blow the element of surprise to chase Brit into what might as well be a first person shooter map, and it turns out later, they knew where Brit's dune buggy was and they could have just laid in ambush there.

It's a fun scene, don't get me wrong, but it's a bit contrived.

Chapter 100: A Brief History of AI p. 37

But there was nothing actually going on inside. No sentience. No awareness. No real choice. Ava was a program, nothing more.

This is the Singularity. There's a spark of life not present in code. I think consciousness arises as a result of cellular density, or moreso the ability of cells to communicate which initially requires proximity. We see the human hive mind, people act like cells of a greater consciousness. Unfortunately that consciousness sucks right now, but it's in its infancy. Imagine what it could do if used well.

Thus C was its first success, not only able to answer any question its creators asked, but also able to decide not to.

He doesn't explain exactly how, the machine figured it out. I can appreciate he didn't get bogged down in details.

While all 106 would work together to bring about the singularity

He uses Singularity to refer to the machine overtaking the biological, and that's commonly accepted but I don't see it that way. The singularity is going from nonliving to living -- somehow -- and it's just sort of logical machines would be able to outperform biological beings.

NEWTON’s second contribution was to create the RKS—the dreaded Robotic Kill Switch. You see, NEWTON understood that the laws by which humanity had hoped to protect itself from AI were the Three Laws of Robotics, created by a science-fiction writer in the 1940s.

Haha, Isaac Newton and Isaac Asimov. A little nod to classic sci-fi. The Foundation Trilogy is amazing if anyone hasn't yet read it.

Have to pick up later, trying to talk Melody into reading this. Link if anyone wants it: https://files.catbox.moe/j2kmxz.pdf u/FuckYourMom you wanna put that in the Op.

Frustrated, it simply stopped talking. When pressed, it said one final thing. “You are not long for this world. I’ve seen the hundred different ways that you die. I’m not sure which it will be, but we will outlast you, my kind and I. Good-bye.” What no one realized at the time was that GALILEO’s choice of words was very deliberate. It knew what the reaction would be.

Huge foreshadowing here but I don't want to go into detail and ruin anything. The rest of the chapter is about the failure of socialism and capitalism. I don't have anything to add on that, so I'll just wrap up and do a new comment as this one has gotten cumbersome. Edit: nvm, my thoughts on the next two are short as well.

And despite the warning, humanity immediately set about forging the path to its own extinction.

Human nature.

Chapter 101: Monuments and Mausoleums p. 43

This is an action scene. It was entertaining, which is kind of rare in my experience. I usually tend to skim past gun fights when they don't add anything to the story.

I had mentioned this earlier, I think of this as the FPS multiplayer level part of the book. It was a terrible place to ambush Brit.

And the parts that ticked in me were the very same that ticked in him—every last resistor, transistor, and chip. I was worth more to him than all the other wrecks and brainsick wanderers out here combined.

They're worth a lot to each other. The caregiver models weren't built to last and there aren't many left.

Chapter 110: The Revolution Revolution p.53

The Lifers were every bit the right-wing, redneck, ignorance-and-anger set that had existed at the fringe of every civil rights battle of the postindustrial age, believing in an angry God who justified their aggression and violence because the Bible said the word man and not bot.

🙄 I don't like when the authors insert their political beliefs and this would be considered an offensive stereotype if he'd made them ghetto blacks instead of bible thumping rednecks.

The Lifers had us right all along; they could read the writing on the wall. There was no place in the new world for them

Oh well, maybe it isn't as one sided as it appears.

BookClub

Chapter 10: The Rise of the OWIs p. 19

Chapter 11: Damned Cannibals

Chapter 100: A Brief History of AI p. 37

Chapter 101: Monuments and Mausoleums p. 43

Chapter 110: The Revolution Revolution p.53