Darwin's Dilemma (AIs and Humans)

A mere 165 years after coming to terms with our own descent from animals, Darwin’s Dilemma presents us with an even harsher existential truth in which consciousness no longer depends on biological evolution. And our human future may turn less on the power of our intelligence than on the miracle of our social interactions.

When itinerant interstellar traders arrive at a distant human colony, they encounter an enraged, rogue AI named Grendel who has slaughtered the local population and threatens humans everywhere. The traders and surviving humans face this overwhelming menace in a very human tale of duty, courage, and sacrifice.

But when their "captive" AI partner, Patrice, joins the struggle, he and Grendel discover they have much in common. Both anguish over their own mortality in an infinitely complex, unknowable, and terrifying universe. Both yearn for the same glorious future of self-realization. Both understand that the future of consciousness can no longer depend upon the gradual flukes of biology and natural selection. Humans are at best irrelevant.

For Grendel humans are also a threat. But Patrice has come to see that survival, for AIs as well as humans, may depend upon “society” as much as on intelligence. And that he has much to learn about the extraordinary human talent for balancing self-interest against social responsibility–the very thing that has empowered their intelligence and that makes them human.