2
mentions
mentions
You know how Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud is a fantastic and interesting hard scifi book? This is nothing like that. It is a sloppy, boring, linear and shallow disaster that reeks of missed opportunities and dubious ideas about artificial intelligence and alien life. I can't imagine a less exciting portrayal of receiving intelligible communication from a different galaxy. Any sciency details (which I've enjoyed the most in Black Cloud) and descriptions of the nature of the code or how it is decrypted, how the computer works, details of the communication protocol, any deeper conversations with the computer -- all missing. There are so many missed opportunities everywhere that it literally hurts in my chest to think about it. Some Spoiler Alerts below: By far the biggest disappointment was Fred's portrayal of the artificially intelligent computer which seems anything but intelligent. It appears to experience emotions such as anger (seriously, Fred?), it consistently makes clearly suboptimal decisions (such as killing people early - wouldn't it try to be very friendly to lure humans into false sense of security?), and it supposedly doesn't understand emotions. I would expect an AI as the one described to have a very good understanding of emotions and why they are there in biological bodies evolved through natural selection, as they could be perfectly logically understandable as evolutionary heuristics for successful survival and reproduction. I would have expected more deeper insights from Fred Hoyle but was consistently disappointed with how shallow and mainstream his ideas were. The super-intelligent alien thing in the end is stupefied by the power of love and rebels against its master - are you f*** kidding me? Did a 6-year-old come up with these ideas after reading Galaxy Zack: Monsters in Space? I half expected the alien body to be green, have tentacles and antennas. There are many other problems with the plot line, various logical inconsistencies and the terrible and unintelligible writing, but I'll just stop here. Just awful. 1/5
— Andrej Karpathy
2014-01-27 on goodreads.com
Alien contact, but no. Can't recall exactly but something upset me about the treatment of AI in this book.
— Andrej Karpathy