Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't a competition though just mutual incompatibility: aliens so alien that we can barely comprehend their motives and are implicitly regarded as hostile by our manner of existence. I'd say the case it was making has only become more relevant with the chatbot age.
> I'd say the case it was making has only become more relevant with the chatbot age. Exactly. The central thesis, consciousness not being necessary for intelligence, is very relevant today. Of course, the existential horror background in the book was also quite well done.
There's something interesting here, where the very thing that prompted the LLM boom (transformer networks) was the thing that introduced a higher level of information integration into neural networks; under the somewhat mainstream theory (not to say uncontroversial, though) that consciousness is a function of Integrative Information (IIT), it could be said that transformers are in a real way more conscious than previous architectures.