Existence
award-winning futurist David Brin returns to globe-spanning, high concept SF with Existence. Gerald Livingstone is an orbital garbage collector. For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and someone has to clean it up. But there’s something spinning a little bit higher than he expects, something that isn’t on the decades’ old orbital maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.” Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, the Artifact is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity.
Stats for nerds
13recommend
32mentions
17people
2013–2026years
72% recommend25% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- ... could never have had a proof attempt presented without the mathematicians setting the stage and working to verify the proof.
I think you might be viewing AI and humanity as a zero sum experiment. It's really not. Go read some David Brin (Existence is a good start). We don't know all the positive and negative aspects to come, but we aren't in a dark forest situation. Existentially, AI is here, what are we going to do with it?
- David Brin's alignment assertions in Existence prove to be more and more fruitful approaches.
- David Brin has a wonderful novel on this topic, Existence, where he discusses several different AI and human systemic evolutions. Wonderful book for our current time.
- That's correct.
Turn off the ads (which is visual and aural pollution in 99.99999% of cases) and said company is literally not viable.
We accept ads because we're conditioned to, not because they represent a real business. The vast majority of advertising spend is inefficient and wasteful in terms of ROI. Most advertising in the space show substantially low statistical power, in effect being unable to identify an effect from random noise.[0] This means ROI measures are normally bunk.
Ad-supported businesses are subject wholly to the whims of unrelated companies and people outside their target client base.
We worry about AI slop, rightfully, yet do little to nothing to stop the memetic, exploitative mind virus advertising (and adtech especially) is.
Recommended reading: Existence, David Brin
[0] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/130/4/1941/191...
- I read Embassytown and Daemon and Freedom(tm) by Daniel Suarez close together. I find they have an interesting theme throughout regarding the role of truth and manipulation. I would not recommend the sequels to 3 body problem. If you like big picture space opera, Existence by David Brin and Exultant by Stephen Baxter are better.
- Consider reading Existence by David Brin. The book premise is the first alien contact being a pyramid scheme.
