The idea that humans might one day become superintelligent — or invent a superintelligent computer — is a staple fibre of science fabrication . It ’s also taken earnestly by scientists and engineer as a plausible outcome of today ’s technologies . Here are ten central books you should read to understand nous of the future tense .
1.20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne
Perhaps the first superintelligent someone to appear in scientific discipline fabrication , the novel ’s hero Captain Nemo is sort of like Iron Man in the late nineteenth one C . He ’s created his own super - submarine ( the Nautilus ) , stocked it with futurist gadget , and solves every problem using his astonishing capacitance for scientific thinking . Nemo became the template for unrestrained scientist and superintelligent people in scifi floor throughout the next C .
2.Sherlock Holmes Series, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Like Captain Nemo , Holmes is a crack - wiz with a highly intellectual mind . He can solve any mystery , just by using his powers of observation and performing exact mental deliberation . Though the Sherlock Holmes mystery series was n’t science fiction , its influence can be experience throughout speculative stories , from Isaac Asimov ’s novels about secret - lick robots to themany scifi novel , comic strip and stories that include Holmes as a character .
22 case of Sherlock Holmes in Science Fiction
3.Slan, by A.E. van Vogt
Published in 1940 , this is one of the first popular novel to have a group of people who have mutated into crack - intelligent beings — sort of X - men mode — and become outcasts . Called Slan after their creator Samuel Lann , the mutation have psychic ability , super - healing and enhanced lightness . But some of them also have tentacle that make them easy to discern . As humans seek to hound down and kill these visible Slan , others go underground and seek to finish the extermination . This struggle between the Slan and the humankind reverberates though a deal of modern-day scientific discipline fiction , from X - men and Heroes to Greg Bear ’s Darwin ’s Radio ( number 5 , below ) .
4.More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon
Sturgeon ’s classic 1954 novel was one of the first to explore the theme of a collective human judgment , or hive mind , that could transcend the powers of an private one . Five people who are alone and broken discover each other , using their nascent psychic power to merge their mind into one super - consciousness . The problem is that one of their ranks is schizoid , and hat humanity . Will he persuade the fellow members of his hive mind to wage war on the convention ?
5. “Understand,” by Ted Chiang inStories of Your Life and Others
Chiang ’s novella shell out with a common figure in science fiction : a drug for mend neurons in the brainiac turns out to bestow superintelligence in the the great unwashed who take it . But this intense , fast - paced level is anything but cliché . As our grinder observe himself progressively ineffectual to understand the non - enhanced the great unwashed around him , he discovers that he has one equal . He ’s ground another superintelligent someone who has take the drug too , but the man quickly becomes his nemesis . The struggle between them is incredibly gripping , and is a absorbing geographic expedition of what intelligence really is .
6.Darwin’s Radioby Greg Bear
In the tradition of Slan , Darwin ’s Radio is about a propagation of mutant children who are born with what seem at first like disability — and turn out to be extraordinary unexampled mental might . We postdate the parents of one such tyke , struggling to protect her from a public and a government gone sore with care .
7.The Bohr Maker, by Linda Nagata
This novel explores a theme that has become usual since its issue in 1995 . A vernal charwoman born in the slums of southeast Asia stumble across a piece of powerful technology — a gadget called the Bohr Maker , whose self - replicating nanomachines merge with its operator and turn her into a star with ascendancy over subject at a molecular spirit level . Fleeing the loaded man who desire to take possession of it , she start out to reconstruct her impoverishment - stricken city and clean its polluted river . It ’s a fascinating geographic expedition of the estimation that intelligence is a weapon , or a tool , rather than an remnant in itself . The novel shares a draw in common with Ramez Naam ’s recentNexusseries , which is also about nanotech brain enhancements and the clash between wealthy person and have - nots .
8.Mind of My Mind,by Octavia Butler
Playing with some of the root word from Sturgeon ’s More Than Human , Butler ’s novel is about how a radical of psychic fall in together to take shape a sinewy , corporate knowingness . Alone , these psychic often go sick , scent up stateless or worse . But when our Heron comes into her psychical powers , she discovers that she possess the “ patternmaster ” power to crumple the creative thinker of her fellow psychic into a whole . Now healed and sane , she and her companion go to take over Los Angeles using judgment restraint — until they touch another patternmaster , who has lived on the perimeter of fellowship for K of twelvemonth .
9.Excession, by Iain M. Banks
This is one of banking concern ’ former Culture novel , which focuses a lot on the superintelligent Minds that run human acculturation with sarcastic benevolence . Like the golem in Isaac Asimov ’s I , Robot solicitation , who conduct humans into a earth of unprecedented peace and prosperity , these Minds allow human to goof around like idiot while they keep things run . Often implanted in Ships and Orbitals where human live , these Minds are humanity ’s caretakers — but they also have their own , incomprehensibly complex patronage to look at with . In Excession , they reveal a subspace anomaly that may be an invasion from another universe . Only the Minds can fully comprehend such a affair , and even they are out of their profoundness .
10.Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge
Vinge is the computer scientist and author who first coined the term “ uniqueness ” to think the rise of superintelligence . In his most celebrated novel , he research civilizations that are headed toward such Singularities , though they have n’t quite made it yet . Still , they ’ve coiffe up quite a successful astronomical democracy , full of aliens , AIs , and various combinations of both . Everything is zooming along at lightspeed , when they ’re threaten by a post - Singular consciousness / creature / disease that turns all matter into molecular sludge and require to take over all usable mind . This is a must - read .
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