Blindsight - Peter Watts
In Progress
Read Peter Watts. I've only read two of his novels1, "The Freeze Frame Revolution" being the other, but the only thing stopping me from reading more is A) the finite amount of time I have on this Earth and B) the fact that other excellent authors and books exist.
How good is Blindsight? The existance of vampires, while perhaps a bit off-putting at first, actually works. Really well. Hard sci-fi with blood sucking monster of myth and it totally works.
Blindsight is an argument: there is a central question that Watts is exploring through-out.
The near-future setting is recognizable, probably more so today than 2006 when it was published. Babies are getting Gattaca-ed2, folks are Deus Ex-ing themselves with all sorts of augments, and the world is on edge.
And that's when an alien ship shows up.
Earth assembles a delegation to welcome and/or destroy the interloper, each member of which has become so specialized that their own humanity is at times difficult to see. The ship responds to messages and the linguistics expert is tasked with figuring out if the ship and it's inhabitants are intelligent. Watt's describes this in terms of the "Chinese room" problem, today it would be more easily described as figuring out if you are talking to a human or ChatGPT.
TODO: Not sure how to describe this without spoilers. The central question is what evolutionary path must a species take to survive in the Dark Forest scenario. Was human intelligence a fluke? A dead end that happened to work for a short blip in time but is ultimately too slow, expensive, and inefficient to survive against a more instinctual predator?