Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

The ones closest to the window tended to get most of her attention, and so there was a kind of natural selection at work, in that the robots that huddled closest to their mother’s cool blue-eyed gaze acquired the most intelligence, while the ones wandering around loose on the dark side never got any smarter.

His working hypothesis was that the breakup of the moon had made Doob young again, exfoliating layers of emotional callus from his soul

“Each enhancement is an amputation.”