Read some great science fiction this year. Tiny takeaways thread:
Daemon & Freedom by @itsDanielSuarez - What is freedom if humans and societies are just systems with incentive structures that can be gamed? How powerful could DAOs become...?
The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin - If the vast universe is a Nietzchean struggle for survival, at what scale do human values matter? Deeply Chinese pragmatic nihilism. Too much prosperity leads to weakness and arrogance, which is fatal.
Ancillary Justice by @ann_leckie - Gender and racial hierarchies will become obsolete, but in the hierarchy of civilization, luxury always comes at someone else's expense.
Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler - Perhaps high intelligence combined with violent, hierarchical tendencies is a fatal flaw in a species. How much genetic engineering to change human nature would you put up with?
Accelerando by Charles Stross - Welcome to the Singularity, AIs and DAOs will consume everything, and the only way to survive is to radically transform yourself.
Some Foundation novels by Asimov - With the ultimate model for data analysis, we can predict and control society to build a powerful empire. A dream at the dawn of cybernetics.
Dune - In the dark ages of the future, there is environmental devastation, medieval gender roles, and backstabbing among the aristocrats. We traded AI overlords for feudalism and jihad going to war over nootropics in space?
This is not the past year anymore, but I'm just going to keep going since people have reminded me of other books, and there's value to having it all in one place:
The Circle by Dave Eggers - Total transparency for politicians and the public lets the SV company behind the tech become all-powerful. Good intentions of founders can be overtaken by rapacious business. Had to write fast before it became reality, he said.
Snowcrash by @nealstephenson - Hacking people. The human mind is profoundly vulnerable to memetic hijacking. Corporate city-states & artificial scarcity in the theoretically unbounded space of VR (thanks to a monopoly) creates ancap dystopia.
VALIS by Philip K. Dick - A only slightly fictionalized account of Dick's hallucinations. The Black Iron Prison never ended, we are in the modern Roman Empire, and a persecuted ancient Gnostic Christian is reaching through spacetime with a message.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut - Full automation creates a technocratic elite of engineers, and everyone else ekes out a meaningless existence on basic income. Do the machines need to be destroyed to reclaim human dignity, or do people just need to feel useful?
The Dispossessed by @ursulaleguin - Scientist from an egalitarian planet, where harsh conditions unite everyone for the common good, moves to a rich planet that supports research. Struggles to reconcile own intellectual freedom with deprivation of majority in stratified society
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