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.

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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.