I would like to throw out some suggested reading: John Barnes’s Thousand Cultures and Meme Wars series. The former deals with the social consequences of smarter-than-human AI, uploading, and what sorts of pills we ought to want to take. The latter deals with nonhuman, non-friendly FOOMs. Both are very good, smart science fiction quite apart from having themes often discussed here.
I have read “A Million Open Doors” and “A World Made of Glass” and don’t remember ANY AI at all in them. And only limited uploading. And are there any Meme Wars novels other than “Kaleidoscope Century” and “Candle”? They were decent but not great stories, but the “memetic virus” background required a serious “suspension of disbelief”. Barnes’s least unrealistic uploading and FOOM novel was the space-farers in “Mother of Storms”.
Thousand Cultures: The technology develops through the series. In “The Merchants of Souls” the uploading is the main McGuffin, and in “The Armies of Memory” the AIs are, with the uploads as a good second.
Meme Wars: You are missing “Orbital Resonance” and “The Sky so Big and Black”, although I the memes as such are background, not the main story element, in both.
I would like to throw out some suggested reading: John Barnes’s Thousand Cultures and Meme Wars series. The former deals with the social consequences of smarter-than-human AI, uploading, and what sorts of pills we ought to want to take. The latter deals with nonhuman, non-friendly FOOMs. Both are very good, smart science fiction quite apart from having themes often discussed here.
I have read “A Million Open Doors” and “A World Made of Glass” and don’t remember ANY AI at all in them. And only limited uploading. And are there any Meme Wars novels other than “Kaleidoscope Century” and “Candle”? They were decent but not great stories, but the “memetic virus” background required a serious “suspension of disbelief”. Barnes’s least unrealistic uploading and FOOM novel was the space-farers in “Mother of Storms”.
Thousand Cultures: The technology develops through the series. In “The Merchants of Souls” the uploading is the main McGuffin, and in “The Armies of Memory” the AIs are, with the uploads as a good second.
Meme Wars: You are missing “Orbital Resonance” and “The Sky so Big and Black”, although I the memes as such are background, not the main story element, in both.