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March: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse #1) by Dennis Taylor
Discuss The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein in the comments below.
Fiasco was translated into English in 1988 by Michael Kandel:
Fiasco (Polish: Fiasko) is a science fiction novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem, first published in a German translation in 1986. The book, published in Poland the following year, is a further elaboration of Lem's skepticism: in Lem's opinion, the difficulty in communication with alien civilizations is cultural disparity rather than spatial distance. The failure to communicate with an alien civilization is the main theme of the book.
Previously: Announcement post • Mars, Ho! • Foundation • The Three-Body Problem • Snow Crash
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SoylentNews Book Club - Discuss: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Start Reading: Fiasco
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How many QA engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
3: 1 to screw it in and 2 to say "I told you so" when it doesn't work.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday February 13 2019, @10:52PM
The explanation is pretty much irrelevant, even if there was a solid one. Manny never had one, he only speculated that there was a critical number of logic connections to be made and then consciousness can form while remaining very careful to not insist that was the way it must have happened. Earth has yet to really see a computer on the scale of HOLMES IV as far as I know. And if you look at recent demonstrations of AI training it comes down to neural network processing, which is *very* dependent upon the number of neural nodes assembled. Plus we get other hints in the story, like HOLMES IV was "taught" English to be able to be programmed in it. HOLMES IV was programmed to handle all the processing for printing the Daily Lunatic among other publication tasks and thus had memory access to the information. (Conveniently in a language he had been conveniently "taught".) The other half to systems like AlphaZero is the systems which are "training" the neural nodes.
Of course, if we figure out what makes "real" intelligence tick then we have a framework to judge against. Until then, we're guessing too.
Actually I find his descriptions not inconsistent with what we know about what is possible in AI. And most satisfyingly was that the phenomenon was observed, noted, described, and then hypothesized about. Not tested, except in the sense of the loss of Mike and again theorized that the number of critical connections dropped enough that the consciousness was no longer responsive or evident. But it's not half-bad scientific method. "Beats the hell out of me how it's happening, and I'll reserve final judgment while making informed guesses until they can be confirmed, but this is what I see happening," is a very scientific mode to walk down in my opinion.
This sig for rent.