Greg Egan

“This book imagines a far future in which the world is populated with a diverse range of what I will call ‘persons’, rather than ‘humans’. This is a society without significant scarcity. In this society, people have immense freedom to consider what kind of life they want to live because they don’t need to hold down a job to draw an income. Furthermore, you can control your own values, especially if you’re one of the AI systems. You can just tinker with your settings, saying, ‘Okay, I think I’m going to really love math for a little while’, or you can change your values in many other ways. You can voluntarily adopt a new worldview for a while, then shed it. It gives us the existentialists’ question in its purest form.” Read more...

Science Fiction and Philosophy

Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosopher

“This book is by Greg Egan, an Australian science fiction writer. He’s well known in circles that think about what I’ve been talking about and pretty much unknown outside them. To my mind, he’s written better about AI than any other writer, because he takes it seriously. He recognizes it represents enormous change. Permutation City is about a time in history when uploading becomes possible and very rich people can upload themselves into machines which operate quickly and in real time. Poorer people have to upload themselves into machines which process very slowly and so they live very slow versions of life” Read more...

The best books on Artificial Intelligence

Calum Chace, Novelist