Oh my gods. I love this series so much. I don’t know if I’d call the entire thing solar punk, rather the goal of the series seems to be to play with the idea of what life could look like if the person is vastly different from a human. I would highly recommend the entire series, though.
I love all of the books and rate them some of my favourites of all time, but my absolute favourite is Children of Memory. It took me a decent amount of time to figure out what was going on, and it was absolutely devastating. Then he turned it around and revealed that my conclusion was wrong, and it was even worse.
I love Kern as a character. She’s headstrong and steadfast in her beliefs from the get-go, and I find that really compelling in a person. She’s not without kindness though, even though that kindness often comes as a result of self-interest.
Don’t know if I’d call that an intention of the machine but rather the creator. Hate to be that kind of person but it’s similar to the whole thing of “guns don’t kill, people do.”
LLMs aren’t people. They’re not self-aware and don’t have any inner complexities like say, a dog, or a sheep has. There’s no drive or motivation. It’s just maths.
If you tie someone to a train track, and a train comes along killing them, it’s not like the train or the track intended to kill the person. That was the intent of you, who “programmed” the scenario.
Similar to guns, strict control is what will be needed to fix these kinds of things. Megalomaniac billionaires who see people as nothing but numbers running amok with narcissistic manipulator systems isn’t a recipe for anything good.