Ramblin' & Amblin' (2026-10-17): Blindsight by Peter Watts is a book that

Blindsight by Peter Watts is a book that every single person in technology should read right now put down whatever else you're looking at I don't care if it's a technical manual or if it's I don't know I'm trying to be funny here but the thing is is this book describes what I'm trying to articulate through this AI appearance of competence is that in the book an alien appears okay doesn't matter we don't know what it is you can't identify it appears disappears but then the ship appears out in space and earth gets together and sends out a crew to figure out what in the world just happened and it sounds shallow but it is not it is why I slept on Hail Mary because I felt like Hail Mary Hail Mary was a basically a watered down version of Blindsight but actually I now see that it's quite the opposite I see it as if more optimistic Peter Watts is not known for being an optimist anywhere a little bit more so the thing is in the book Peter Watts lays out the concept of this alien that is so foreign to us so alien truly alien that we think we think we're talking to it but it but it soon becomes apparent that it's a Chinese room and this is a thought experiment I don't remember if it was from 80s or 70s or even before basically how what we're facing with all of them is that you have a bunch of symbols mapped to each other so that way if you receive one symbol you map it to another symbol you don't know what any of the mappings mean you just receive these symbols and then you make increasingly more complicated make increasingly more complicated series of responses based on pattern matching rules things like that so fantastic book because what they quickly realize crew quickly realizes and this is not spo iling too much from the book it's kind of central to the premise is that intelligence is that intelligence is not necessarily coupled to consciousness and awareness of what you're doing and why you're doing it or having the concept of why is not is not universally required why does why does a bee form its honeycomb in a hexagon well it's just physics so it's not that it's sets out to make hexagon it just when if you stand and you spit wax in a circle and all your other bee mates are doing the same thing and it's lining up guess what it settles into it's a hexagon as it flattens out from the weight distribution um they didn't make a hexagon a hexagon is just the only form that could appear but we ascribe intention to to the to this and in in our sense of consciousness so Blindsight and it's available for free on rifters.com if you google for Blindsight you'll be able to find the book um and i do recommend reading it and not just uh not just uh looking it up on gemini or google