Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

You will fail, and when you do, you must do everything you can to fail as little as possible. Don’t let the failure get its teeth into you. You will make decisions that come with a cost. That is Command. Do not let the cost consume you.

That is how the stories go, although sometimes they use words other than “witch” for the thing the story is about, such as genie or demon or artificial intelligence.

“The essential fallacy,” Gothi picks up, “is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.”

Imagine how hard that would be, to actually have to think about things all the time.”

Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.