My science fiction story “Eight Reasons You Are Alone” is available today in Nature Futures! You’ve pulled it off, and learned the price, and now you have plenty of time to think about the consequences. There’s nobody left to talk to, after all. (Non-paywalled archival link here.)
But the alarm came too late for the shuttles to escape the blast radius.
All but yours, which launched before the alarm with only one human aboard.
I think you believed the shuttles would be fast enough to escape. But you never investigated. You certainly never asked me.
When you pass your shuttle’s 19 empty berths, do you imagine your dead co-workers? The family you haven’t seen in years? Or nothing at all?
I’ve always wanted to be published in Nature, but my science is in the wrong field for it, so I’m pleased to find this other route into one of science’s most prestigious publications.
More notes below the fold:
Here are the story notes that appear on the paywalled link but not the free klink:
As a neuroscientist and writer, the most common piece of life advice I give is: “Never underestimate the ability of a human being to lie to themselves.” According to the classic split-brain research of Gazzaniga et al., our internal narrative spins a story about our actions, often after the fact. Man is the rationalizing animal, as the saying (and the social psychology research) goes. The real world is always messier than story, and in the gap between, we have enough space to write a narrative that paints us as the hero.
Someday, our artificial intelligences will be capable enough to pass for human. Maybe they’ll need to rationalize their choices like we do, or maybe they’ll just play-act whatever it takes to pass the Turing test. I’m not sure we’ll be able to tell the difference from the outside. More importantly, the difference might not matter at all. The voice of your conscience can be a public-relations language shell. You don’t need to understand it, and it doesn’t need to understand you, so long as you can work together to scribble a little bit of good in the space between the lines of your mistakes.