Reprint time! Now that I’m no longer working for Escape Pod, I can send my stories there – which means you all get to read & listen to “Conference of the Birds,” my short story about our hard-working distributed-mind friend Surveillance Hub. This story originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction (Jan/Feb 2021).
Birds aren’t real, but they can definitely fake it.
If they couldn’t recruit a human, maybe they could build one. Or at least a useful simulacrum.
This story captures a lot of my opinions about consciousness, distributed minds, artificial intelligence, how we ought to interact with these things – and how they ought to interact with us. To read more about the neuroscience & philosophy behind “Conference of the Birds,” check out Embodied and Empathetic Minds, the companion essay I wrote for the Analog blog.