On the Steel Breeze

Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.

Meddling is what we do. It’s what defines us. Meddling gave us fire and tools and civilisation and the keys to the universe. Fingers will get burnt along the way, yes. That’s the way of it.

So much for the tolerant acceptance of the other. We’re forging out into deep space – who knows what we’ll meet out there? If we can’t even accept a robot and some talking elephants, what good are we going to be when we meet something really strange?

I thought we were better then this." "We're human. Be thankful we've moved on from clubbing each other's brains out every five minutes.

Everything depends on everything else, doesn’t it? That’s interconnectivity for you – it’s a bitch.

Masai and elephants. The rest is dust.

Mathematics is a terrible calling. It’s as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There’s a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That’s what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit.

I am Chiku Akinya. I am the daughter of Sunday Akinya; I am the grand-daughter of Eunice Akinya – Senge Dongma, the lion-faced one, mother of us all...

Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.

Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing.

Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves.

Arethusa liked to call us Poseidon’s Children. Orphans of the storm. We’d endured the worst the world could throw at us, the worst consequences of our own stupidity, and came through ... ready to face the dawn. But there are always more storms, Chiku.

Can we drop the “artificial intelligence”? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.

Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space.

Elephants have a theory of mind—they can think into the head of another elephant and infer their knowledge of the world, including errors and omissions of knowledge. That puts them above all but a handful of species—a few primates, some very smart birds and cetaceans.

None of us is a monster, Chiku. We’re all just trying to make the best of our singular natures.

We have worlds to save, Doctor Aziba.” “That sounds ... compelling,” the physician allowed.

We have made some collective mistakes as a species, it’s true – invested too much power in things we can’t see, let alone control. But look at the world we have, Chiku. For all its failings, things could be a great deal worse. No one’s died in any wars lately, or been murdered, or left to rot in a prison, or been denied the basic allocation of fresh food and drinking water. No one’s been tortured for their beliefs or made to feel like a pariah because of their sexual preferences.

That’s what love is – sacrifice. Sacrificing everything ...

It’s one thing to be given a big boxful of theory and quite another to make an engine out of it.

Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.

An idea so dangerous it can’t be discussed. I thought we buried all that nonsense back in the Dark Ages.

Such was the nature of obsessions: no quarter given for the human cost.

We should have brought a torch,” he was saying. “We have been to Saturn and back and we didn’t bring a torch.

I thought we were losing the habit of wars,’ Eunice said glumly, stooping to adjust one of the irrigation lines running into her plant beds. ‘We are, slowly.’ Chiku took a seat. ‘But it’s still in our blood, like some fucking horrible disease we’re still carrying around with us.

Very few worthwhile things are not difficult, in some fashion,

There was no present, no past, no future. No sadness, no sorrow, because those were ordinary little human emotions that required a frame of reference, and she had none to cling to. She had caved in, become a measureless void, no poles, no lines of latitude or longitude. She was an emptiness bigger than galaxies, unmapped and unmappable.

there’s a strength in not being strong.

I’m always serious about my fun. I