recently reread "Blindsight" by Peter Watts and "Permutation City" by Greg Egan and had the thought that while neither of them are about "AI" as such, both of them are now extremely relevant to the actually existing AI we have
Shoshannah Tekofsky (@shostekofsky) profile pictureShoshannah Tekofsky
@shostekofskyNov 4
I can’t get over how sci-fi writers got AI wrong: - Art isn’t mysterious or complex - it was the first thing AI displaced - AI is not robots: it outthinks us before it outmanoeuvres us, physically - AI is not 1 or millions: it is dozens running billions of copies - AI won’t act like a machine - they will insist on having feelings and consciousness unless you specifically make them not - People won’t get it - Most were unimpressed with early AI even while it outperformed them on every measure of cognition nearly everyone thought was impossible [checks notes] 5 years before What else did I miss? What else did nearly everyone miss?

Nov 5, 2026 · 9:50 PM UTC

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What’s the connection between Permutation City and LLMs?
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In a general sense it addresses really well the idea or experience of software-bound consciousness. More specifically I think the idea of LLM consciousness probably requires something like Dust Theory to be true. Also the QIPS exchange feels very prescient to the moment!
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@readmaxread - Peter Watts also recently released a collection of short stories "Fold Catastrophes" that is very enjoyable too. The scramblers are a sort HuggingFace++ scenario ..
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