I can’t end this review without saying that The Inheritors is one step away from being an allegory in AI safety. The overwhelming difference between the old people and the new people is intelligence.
I mean, while it may be compelling fiction:
The relative intelligence of homo sapiens and neanderthals seems kinda unclear at the moment. They actually had larger brains than humans, and I’ve read hypotheses that they were smarter. They cooked with fire, built weapons, very likely had language, etc.
The Inheritors was published in 1955. It looks like in it the Neanderthals don’t, for instance, hunt large mammals, but Wikipedia says this is an old misconception and we now believe them to have been apex predators.
There are numerous hypotheses about why homo sapiens outcompeted neanderthals, some hinging on, for instance, boring old things like viruses and so on.
So I think it a bad idea to update more from this than one would from a completely fictitious story.
I mean, while it may be compelling fiction:
The relative intelligence of homo sapiens and neanderthals seems kinda unclear at the moment. They actually had larger brains than humans, and I’ve read hypotheses that they were smarter. They cooked with fire, built weapons, very likely had language, etc.
The Inheritors was published in 1955. It looks like in it the Neanderthals don’t, for instance, hunt large mammals, but Wikipedia says this is an old misconception and we now believe them to have been apex predators.
There are numerous hypotheses about why homo sapiens outcompeted neanderthals, some hinging on, for instance, boring old things like viruses and so on.
So I think it a bad idea to update more from this than one would from a completely fictitious story.
This is why I went out of my way not to call them neanderthals, and also why I say “The Inheritors told me nothing knew.”