[joshmarlow]

Fascinating read!

> Theophrastus closes by asking whether human consciousness is a ‘stumbling’ on the way to ‘unconscious perfection’.

This reminds me of a line from the scifi novel Echopraxia where one of the characters explains that as AIs become more intelligent, they 'wake up' and become conscious like humans. But then as they continue to grow, they eventually go back to sleep - and those are the machines to be afraid of. '

[goatlover]

In the 3001 novel, the last of the 2001 series by Clarke, the Dave simulation explains that while the monolith can simulate conscious beings, it is itself not conscious. This is similar to The Expanse novels, where it's explained that that the protomolecule technology was limited to not being conscious on purpose by it's creators, and yet could still somehow simulate conscious beings it wanted to use as tools.

[fishtacos]

I'm not well-versed enough on sci-fi to be able to connect more dots than this, but I am assuming these are common tropes.

The Mass Effect series describes the Reapers as (copied from masseffect.fandom.com - I <3 this game's lore):

"The Reapers are a highly-advanced machine race of synthetic-organic starships. The Reapers reside in dark space: the vast, mostly starless space between galaxies. They hibernate there, dormant for fifty thousand years at a time, before returning to the galaxy...the Reapers spare little concern for whatever labels other races choose to call them, and merely claim that they have neither beginning nor end."

The other pop-sci-fi analogue I can think of is The Borg.

[le-mark]

Fred Saberhagen Beserkers are the first instance of this concept I’m familiar with (1963)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(novel_series)