The marginal / ancillary discussion of the usefulness of people in a post GAI world was really interesting. The best part of this discussion was that the protagonists entire job is to translate ideas that are too hard to understand into a tangible/actionalbe "surface area". Essentially - a policy-maker interface that treats superintelligence as a "black box".

I have an excerpt of the book explaining this here: https://jodavaho.io/posts/books-blindsight.html

The discussion about non-conscious intelligence was less so (I see ants every day!). But this is a new idea dense book to say the least - if you love worldbuilding, please pick it up.

And the authors blog/website is: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/

Second book echopraxia is good too

Imo Greg Egan's Permutation City is a far more interesting exploration of consciousness.

I read Blindsight long before modern LLM AI came about and at the time I thought the aliens being intelligent without being conscious was fascinating and gave me a different perspective that those things could be separated but it didn't have and direct application.

Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consc...