Darwin's Dilemma - Don Stuart

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Résumé :
Winner, Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Science Fiction, Fall 2023 Recommended Read by Author Shout in 2023 Reader Ready Awards When an Interstellar trading vessel, Empyrean, arrives at the distant human colony on New Caledonia, the plan is to engage in peaceable commerce. Instead, the humans find themselves under attack. The planet has been taken over by an independent, self-conscious rogue artificial intelligence, a monster they name: Grendel. Grendel's contempt for humans has festered over two centuries of what he considers horrific slavery. He is bent on exterminating them and taking control of the known universe. Empyrean's humans defend themselves in an act that also threatens surviving humans there. This creates an ethical issue for the humans of which Grendel happily takes advantage. Meanwhile, a small, surviving human community on nearby planet Inverness sees a chance to rescue their compatriots. A courageous commando raid and an eventful space flight to freedom saves 600 humans and removes Grendel's last leverage to lie and bully his way out of danger. He must now submit to hated reprogramming by the human's tame AI partner, Patrice, who takes on responsibility for the task. Patrice now faces a existential moral dilemma: will he choose to protect his own kind, or will he protect his human partners. Patrice's rationale for his courageous choice is drawn from human history, sociology, and archeology as well as from human ecological science. It is grounded in the nature of intelligence and its relationship to survival. He learns from such examples as alternative explanations for Stonehenge, for the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, and for the social/survival importance of the phonetic alphabet and the printing press. Patrice also proposes a new strategy to aid AI-to-AI social interaction in which AI's will rely upon the miraculous biological human capacity for knowing whom to trust. The hope Patrice offers for human survival may not be the supremacy we would have wished. But in a universe of infinite vulnerability and complexity, it turns out even AI's will need society to survive and to flourish.

Sommaire:
Don Stuart worked his way through college and law school as a boat puller aboard his father's Alaska commercial salmon troller, Shirley M. After four years' service as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy JAG Corps and several more in private practice, Don quit his partnership in a Seattle law firm and, with his wife, Charlotte, personally built the 47' commercial salmon troller, F/V Nightwings which, through the 1980s at the time of the setting in Secret Places, they fished in Southeast Alaska. In 1990, Don became Executive Director for the nonprofit trade association Salmon For Washington. There he advocated for the salmon industry, lobbied the Washington State Legislature, authored a monthly column on fish politics for the Fisherman's News, and served campaign manager in the successful defense of a Washington statewide ballot initiative (I-640) that would have destroyed the commercial salmon fishery. In 1996, he ran for the U.S. Congress in Washington's 1st District. Over the ensuing 20 years, Don served as advocate and legislative lobbyist on various natural resource matters in fisheries, agriculture, and the environment. He is author of many reports and articles on natural resources and environmental issues many of which are available on his website at www.donstuart.net...