Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin

Such an awkward word, "species-ism," but what if it's the right one?

I don't mean the right word for the still-churning shards of 20th-century environmental conflict, or as a shadow version of more intensely virulent varietals of racism, though it has been useful there, too. At the moment, I'm worrying about the consequences of unplanned, uncontrolled LLM-driven social change, and no, I'm not the least bit persuaded that we ought to treat an LLM as "alive," let alone as something akin to a species that would matter for a term like "species-ism."

Today, I'm sitting at home, writing desultorily about Adrian Tchaikovsky's 2015 novel Children of Ruin. My neighbour is busily applying assorted waxes, stains and varnishes to the bits of mid-century modern chairs she's spent the last few day sanding and stripping, and she's playing Bonnie Raitt's 1974 album Streetlights: lots of disagreement about that album's place in her oeuvre, and about the circumstances of its production, but I'll forever refuse to accept any argument that "Angel from Montgomery" isn't one of the great songs of the 20th century. My door's open because otherwise my dog and cat will each spend the morning insisting that they're on the wrong side of the door, and so I'm hearing Bonnie Raitt and a sander and vehicles and birds, and I'm smelling stains and waxes and the dog and the slowly heating soil of the garden.

And I'm wondering what matters.

Tchaikovsky's novel, to be clear, was gripping and fun and frustrating in all kinds of positive ways. It's hard-core science fiction, and it's a sequel, too, so there are lots of reasons making it not for everyone, but actually this is maybe exactly the right time for it to find new readers. Basically (your cue to clench for unreasonable over-simplifications!), Children of Ruin is about the ways in which different forms of intelligence might come to terms with each other, without surrendering themselves to the other.

The sections labelled "Past" are about the history of humanity, which at this point is bound up with a species known as the Portiid, which are basically over-sized spiders; humanity almost wiped itself out, and only survived after contact with the Portiid that led to a kind of overlapping uplift that means humans are now Humans. Really, the "Past" sections are about the fallout from a specific terraforming expedition's encounter with the planets of a particular star, including one member of the expedition's ongoing experiments toward enhancing the sentience and consciousness of his octopus pets and/or colleagues.

The sections labelled "Present" are at first startling and unsettling, but it quickly becomes clear that some of the expedition's efforts have been successful, while others haven't, and also that the term "successful" is at best contested. Eventually, the past catches up to the present, and the Humans, the Portiid, and their shared AI (Dr. Avrana Kern, as she originally was, and as she/it/they insist on being referred as to still) try to come to terms with the presence in this planetary system of two radically alien species and consciousnesses.

So far, so good, but why am I worrying about LLMs, and why am I thinking about my neighbour's furniture hobby and her taste for the great Bonnie Raitt?

It's sappy and naive, but genuinely, I treasure the world and all these sensations and experiences: the smell of oak-leaf humus and fir-flower toasting in the sun, the twang and hum of a slide guitar, the snore of small dog with tracheal collapse, a bizarrely complex and richly realized novel sprung from a human brain, even the leftover enchiladas I'll have for lunch soon.

Few of those things would have much meaning, if any, for the non-human species  in Tchaikovsky's novel, certainly no lasting meaning, and of course this particular constellation of them has more meaning for me than for any other member of my own species. They wouldn't have any meaning for an AI, or an LLM for that matter (which of course doesn't have a concept of meaning, only of probabilities, but ... no, it is too much), and so to what extent is my fight against the adoption and distribution of AI and LLMs a species-ist fixation on things which matter only to us as humans? Or only to me, as a single and badly non-representative instance of that-which-is-human?

Don't get me wrong: the LLMs have been brought to us by the worst humans, and some of the worst human impulses, and I'll keep trying to squash their use by anyone I can reach.

But among everything else that Adrian Tchaikovsky and Children of Ruin have done for me, it has at least made me anxious about the extent to which this really may be about me, or about defending or mourning the world that the tech bros have placed under such imminent, critical, extinction-level threat.

Fight the power, friends. We deserve better.