These gogols are able to provide the extra computational power of a miniature (and sadly often sentient!) mind that you can throw them around willy-nilly for whatever you want help with, like in cracking cryptographic locks or embedding into a bullet to give it homing capacities. Or the rampant Gogol Piracy in which people who possess unique and specialized minds (ex - chocolatiers) are so highly valued that they are susceptible to thieves stealing their mind, digitally uploading it, stripping it down to its bare essentials to perform its unique function, and making and illegally distributing copies of it to be used in various tools and machinery. Take the Dilemma Prison for example, where your mind is trapped in a simulation playing Game Theory against multiple infinite copies of yourself over and over, and where the prison itself ravenously desires to expand and tile the universe in perfect game-theoretic harmony. And Rajaniemi does not sprinkle in these concepts lightly! He firehoses you with them. The Quantum Thief is chock full of those concepts that challenge what we think is normal and permanent. What parts of our humanity might change as opposed to what parts compose our non-changing core essence? As Asimov said, “Science fiction is important because it fights the natural notion that there’s something permanent about the things the way they are right now”. Fortunately, I was finally in a what-the-heck mood and I can say that I was more than glad to have given this book a chance and be proven wrong…although I do think it also helped to find out that the author Hannu Rajaniemi (who has a cool badass-sounding name by the way) lives near me and that he’s formally trained with a PhD in Mathematical Physics!Īnyways, one of the main reasons why I and many others read sci-fi books is because they often offer mind-bending thought experiments of what could be, allowing us readers to compare and contrast that hypothetical reality to what we have now. I’ve honestly put off reading this book for around 6 years because I thought it would be full of sci-fi nonsense, with technical terms thrown in haphazardly with no actual meaning that it might as well be akin to magic.
TL DR - Dilemma Prisons where you play infinite copies of yourself and expands by tiling the universe in perfect game-theoretic harmony, mind piracy, optogenetic viruses, cryptographic exomemory, & more!
Topics: Mathematics, Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, Cognitive ScienceĬross-posted from my Goodreads reviews found here.
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