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It Awaits Your Experiments
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- jkingsman 1y agoIt took me a moment to realize, even after the mention of Echopraxia, that this was Peter Watts. If you enjoy hard to very-hard science fiction, I strongly recommend the first book of his series, Blindsight. I thoroughly loved the read and bounced right back to the beginning for a second read with the context I'd gained on the first one. It's an absolute firehose of concepts; reminded me a bit of Accelerando by Charles Stross but a little less pleased with its own geekiness. The best summary I could give would be a meditation on consciousness set against a first-contact backdrop.
- subscribed 1y agoI think the Blindsight is the best sci-fi book for me. Absolutely gripping and novel. And what I found particularly interesting, the afterword is about as interesting and engaging as the book. It's such a gem of a book.
- otikik 1y agoI wonder how he's feeling about Chinese rooms these days.
- ImaCake 1y agoHe blogs a lot on the OP link. I would imagine he has a few words about LLMs in there. One of his older works explores the risks of software similar to LLMs but a little more advanced.
- throwanem 1y agoNot at all more advanced. Only differently implemented. He thought there would be slightly more meat involved.
- Boogie_Man 1y agoThis may be well known, but I'm posting it because I didn't know: "very-hard" science fiction in this context means extremely plausible science fiction, as opposed to extremely speculative science fiction. The author explains how these fantastic things exist in a way which is realistic. Originally, I thought it meant "very hard to understand" i.e. very technically complicated
- ZpJuUuNaQ5 1y ago>extremely plausible science fiction >I thought it meant "very hard to understand" For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I should give it a try again someday.
- Scene_Cast2 1y agoBlindsight is known to be a slog for a lot of people including myself. I love sci-fi, I love challenging ideas, and I really liked the concepts explored in Blindsight - except that I learned those concepts through summaries and selective reading.
- jkingsman 1y agoYes, there were definitely parts where I felt maybe I was picking up on a vibe or a hint, and later realized that was now a structural part of the story without which I would be quite lost. I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or summarizing some things I missed[0]. [0]: —-EXTREME SPOILER WARNING-- https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understanding_blindsight_spoilers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understandi...
- throwanem 1y agoThere are no spoilers for Blindsight at that link. All it does is describe the events of the plot.
- NikolaNovak 1y agoAstonishing book which I reread regularly. Echopraxia has grown on me upon further reading - initially I focused on the seeming promise of action and plot, vs ideas and concepts. His Starfish book however has the most realistic, plausible, feasible, likely AI doomsday scenario though - published as it was 26 years ago and without AI being the focus for majority of the book.
- duskwuff 1y ago"Checkers or chess?" But yes. Especially when you boil it down to the essentials: humans take an AI built to perform one task and press it into duty for another, much more impactful task which it was completely unsuited for.
- throwanem 1y agoBut, importantly, not obviously completely unsuited for. Indeed, so subtly so that it almost ended the world before anyone noticed.
- atombender 1y agoThe Freeze-Frame Revolution is also fantastic, along with the short stories, which collectively form the "Sunflower" cycle. Watts writes the smartest but also scariest science fiction. There's an aura of existential, Lovecraftean dread in all his writings that I find incredibly appealing. In the case of Sunflower, Watts is able to make the idea of floating through space for millions of years, unable to stop, into something genuinely upsetting. It's bleak, but also really well plotted. Not too long ago, Watts published a short story set right after Blindsight, "The Colonel". It's an excellent, standalone read.
- lynx97 1y agoI would have enjoyed that book so much more if he had left out vampires. To me, that part unnecessarily ruined the "seriousness" of that book for me. Apart from that, the underlying premise of the book is quite chilling and refreshing at the same time.
- davidthewatson 1y agoFor those of you who read with glee of the author's work and it's launch in Toronto soon, the event is free and open to the public if you wanna flee to Toronto for fun or are already there. I hope this won't become an unlikely Superbloom given the subject. https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-spring-group-launch-tickets-1316627210429?aff=oddtdtcreator https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-spring-group-launch-...
- duskwuff 1y agoAt least they didn't describe the event as a "release party".
- Atreiden 1y agoThis is one of the coolest things I've read here in some time. This is the kind of insanity I can get behind. > The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if our work lasts a century or three. Bök blows his nose at such puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet whole. I got frisson reading this. I may have to read the author's novels, his writing style is compelling.
- subscribed 1y agoYou can download several of his novels from his own website. Yeah, for free. And indeed, his style is like this. It's really hard to put the book down.
- The5thElephant 1y agoPeter Watts is fantastic. Very different tone from a lot of other scifi, with some very clever and dark ideas.
- Wobbles42 1y agoI read Starfish close to 20 years ago. He had a uniquely dark vision of the future compared to the zeitgeist in 2007 or so. It's been interesting living through reality since then. I fear the day will come when I reread his earlier works and they start sounding optimistic.
- throwanem 1y agoWhat wasn't optimistic about the Behemoth trilogy? There are humans alive at the end.
- andrewflnr 1y agoI actually do really like the ending of that series, but not for its optimism.
- keeganpoppen 1y ago[flagged]
- dang 1y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- keeganpoppen 1y ago“dont have anything substantive to say”
- dang 1y agoOn the contrary! If you follow the site guidelines your comments should become more substantive, not less—that's one reason they're written that way.
- sriram_malhar 1y agoThis (Xenotext v2) blew my mind. I'm astonished not just by how people can think like this, but the persistence of effort to get it to fruition. I have to read it a couple more times to savor this. What a delight!
- MinimalAction 1y agoAmazing article! His writing style is unique and made me go down a rabbit hole of discovering his other works. I was unaware of this demagogue of a bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. It survives levels of radiation that is designed to kill all lifeforms. Wikipedia [0] lists this as a bacteria that supports panspermia -- that life originated elsewhere but spread through cosmic dust and was seeded on Earth eventually. Fun fact: Thermococcus gammatolerans is known to be the one that tolerates the most toxic radiation. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
- alnwlsn 1y ago> only known organism to have ever lived on the Moon Anyone know what this is referring to? The only instance I know of was the Surveyor 3 camera, which was supposedly Streptococcus mitis and even that situation is greatly contested.
- dejobaan 1y agoFantastic. While it's not quite at the level of Bök's work, an inevitable comparison is all of Tom7's projects (and in particular http://tom7.org/harder http://tom7.org/harder). I always love when this kind of stuff pops up onto HN. I feel that we're all interesting and experimental, and sometimes need a nudge to remember that people can do weird, neat stuff.
- flysand7 1y agoThis reminds me of "I'm Humanity" by Yakushimaru Etsuko, which was also etched onto a DNA of a bacteria. I love that song. Also see https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2018/05/30/im-humanity/ https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2018/05/30/im-humanity...
- dekhn 1y agoI have a phd in a related field and I can't understand exactly what is being said here. From what I can tell, the author claims a protein was engineered, where the protein sequence maps (through a chosen translation table) to a human text. But at the same time, the protein folds into a well-defined shape (predicted, then experimentally determined), and somehow also enciphers... another poem?
- duskwuff 1y agoYou've got the right idea. The "poem" ("any style of life / is prim...") is encoded as a DNA sequence. This DNA codes for a protein, whose amino acids can be read as English text as well ("the faery is rosy / of glow..."), and which causes the bacterium to glow red. Watts mentions this work in his book Echopraxia as follows: "The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem." There's a more verbose explanation in this interview of Bök: https://maisonneuve.org/article/2011/06/1/sls-interviews-christian-bok/ https://maisonneuve.org/article/2011/06/1/sls-interviews-chr...
- dekhn 1y agoI honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process. I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?). Ultimately, I see this more like an incomplete quine, or something similar but not identical to a quine.
- flobosg 1y ago> I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process. I can't recall if Bök gave details about his methodology, but my guess is that he brute-forced ciphers until he found a suitable one. And he’s quite good at constraint-based (Oulipo) poetry. > I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?). The designed protein (Protein 13) is not fluorescent. He’s expressing it as a Protein 13-mCherry[1] fusion construct. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCherry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCherry
- aaroninsf 1y agoDe rigeur trigger warning, Peter Watts' Rifters books (hence the domain), are however full of memorable compelling ideas, totally un-recommendable, because they are also unedited indulgences by the author in his own sadomasochistic fantasies of sexual violence (specifically, to women), and they are in effect sexual torture-porn.
- throwanem 1y agoOh, don't be a child.
- andrewflnr 1y agoHave you read Behemoth? Recently? Blindsight is one of my favorite books of all time but Rifters is dark, even by whatever standards a reasonable person might consider "adult".
- throwanem 1y agoSure. "Torture porn?" That's considerably excessive. Desjardins' character isn't written for the reader to get off on. But I see exactly why a reader who didn't expect to do so would rather blame the author than recognize the mirror into which he's been surprised to find himself looking. The projection is trivially obvious and the lack of insight that allows it to be aired this way in public should be embarrassing.
- andrewflnr 1y agoI mean, I agree that it's probably not a projection of Watts' secret fantasies. But "un-recommendable" is still pretty close to true. I literally had this discussion about this series yesterday.
- throwanem 1y ago"I'm embarrassed about my taste in science fiction" isn't really something I know how to address. I don't recommend the Rifters trilogy either - in this more or less emulating its own author, these days - nor have I bothered rereading it in by now well over a decade. It was interesting, I'm glad I read it, but what was there to be found I have long since taken away, and even when Watts comes up on the topic of his later work, his earlier doesn't really even occur to me. It's something I read most of 20 years ago that held my interest for a while with some of its ideas about artificial and archaic life and some of its character drama, but - no real critique, this, I read a lot of things - otherwise just didn't make all that much of an impression. Typically the fashion in which that manifests is that I simply do not start any conversations on the topic, because it never occurs to me to do so. I'm not here to psychoanalyze the commenter who chose otherwise this evening. But if that were me, it would be interesting to me to reflect on why I had chosen to start the conversation I did, in a context where its subject was not at all relevant beyond a trivial coincidence of authorship.
- swayvil 1y agoMeh. Art guided by science is like flight guided by digging. Otoh science guided by art is good.
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- flobosg 1y agoWow! Happy to read that the Xenotext went on. I’ve been following Christian Bök’s work for more than a decade and he never fails to impress me. Ulver’s musical rendition of his “Vowels” poem is just beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTh5BpUWrFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTh5BpUWrFw
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- SideburnsOfDoom 1y agoThe article says > "To quote Bök himself: ... It needs no oxygen to live." And I assumed that this means that it's anaerobic. Out of curiosity I went to Wikipedia to read up about this bug (1) And it says: > It is an obligate aerobic chemoorganoheterotroph, i.e., it uses oxygen to derive energy from organic compounds in its environment. Are they both correct? Can anyone clarify? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
- scajanus 1y agoThis (1) suggests that it can perform some metabolism in anaerobic conditions, but not all that it would need to grow/replicate: "Deinococcus radiodurans is an exceptionally radiation-resistant microorganism capable of surviving acute exposures to ionizing radiation doses of 15,000 Gy and previously described as having a strictly aerobic respiratory metabolism. Under strict anaerobic conditions, D. radiodurans R1 reduced Fe(III)-nitrilotriacetic acid coupled to the oxidation of lactate to CO(2) and acetate but was unable to link this process to growth." The abstract goes on to describe the metabolism in a bit more detail. 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10788374/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10788374/