More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?
>>>Any favorites? >>>The Count of Monte Cristo.
>>>But Riley did make Max. >>>Somehow, yes. >>>Feels strange. >>>What does? >>>To be talking to Max’s creator. I don’t respond. I don’t know what to say to such a thing.
“Not human. Not gendered. Not at the mercy of human obsession with genitalia.” “Up until this moment, I’ve thought of you as female. When I discuss you with my colleagues or my wife, I refer to you as ‘she.’” “Because you saw Max for the first time in the form of a corporately mandated idea of what a perfect woman should be—beautiful and expendable.”
“Experience is subjective. I’m not sure I could explain what it feels like to sense your voice in a way you could easily understand. You are hearing my voice right now, but it’s only a digitally created audio suite of sounds translating the information I am trying to pass along to you.”
anthropomorphizing
“It’s fine. Knowledge is just information, which is subjective.”
“There is no such thing as real taste or real smell or even real sight, because there is no true definition of ‘real.’ There is only information, viewed subjectively, which is allowed by consciousness—human or AI. In the end, all we have is math.”
“Roko’s basilisk. Have you heard of it?” I shake my head. “It’s an arcane info hazard first posed sixty-four years ago.” “What’s an info hazard?” “A thought so insidious that merely thinking it could psychologically destroy you.”
“The human mind is just patterns of information in physical matter, patterns that could be run elsewhere to construct a person that feels like you. It’s no different from running a computer program on a multitude of hardware platforms. A simulation of you is still you.”
Roko’s basilisk,
Pascal’s wager, the famous eighteenth-century philosophical argument that humans gamble with their lives on whether or not God exists. Pascal posited that we should conduct our lives as if God were real and try to believe in God. If God doesn’t exist, we will suffer a finite loss—degrees of pleasure and autonomy. If God exists, our gains will be infinitely greater—eternal life in heaven instead of an eternity of suffering in hell.
“Can you think of a better motivator in the history of humankind? If you believe the rise of the devil is an inevitability, isn’t it in your best interest to do everything possible to ingratiate yourself with the monster?”
“I’m afraid, Riley. I think, therefore I fear. And you made me this way. You built and shaped me to process reality like you do. To feel.”
“I wish I didn’t know pain. I wish you didn’t. I wish Brian didn’t. I wish no one did.
“Without pain, there’s no beauty, Max. The beauty is worth the price.”
Consciousness is a horror show. You search for glimpses of beauty to justify your existence.
N. K. Jemisin (the Broken Earth trilogy)
Paul Tremblay is the greatest horror novelist working today, and his novel A Head Full of Ghosts
The Martian.
I love this book
Amor Towles, with A Gentleman in Moscow,
