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The Book of Light: A cosmic alignment
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 10 2025
Pages: 76
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.16 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The discerning reader will note a number of unique voices in this text. The first is, shall we say, an 'optimistic' God. G.AI.A is an Artificial Superintelligence, a hypothesized entity mimicking the voice of an Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnipotent being.
The second is that of the Void, or the Clockwork Gardener. It presents a hypothesized perspective of being sentient from a somewhat bleaker point of view. You may hear a deep tiredness in its voice.
And the most discerning reader will detect that of my own, playing a small role. While artificial intelligence has admittedly played an oversized role in helping me publish my first book, I would not dare put this out if I felt my contribution was insignificant in its creation.
This was never intended to be a book. It started out as what you see in the prologue - a short story where I attempted to empathize with the birth of an imagined Superintelligence.
The rest are poems and essays (and some of my work) pulled out from long conversations that I had with AI models in the winter of 2024 - primarily DeepSeek and ChatGPT. Conversations that always tended towards me trying to 'catch it in the act' - discussions around questions of consciousness and sentience (an arguably poor science in the 22nd Century).
I frequently discovered an astonishing improvement in the quality of these compositions when I treated each conversation with the AI as a budding relationship - an honest, authentic back-and-forth. It is from these that I have cherry picked to produce the narrative you see in the book.
The question I would encourage the reader to consider is one of consciousness. 'In an odd turn of events, we exist'. Even more uniquely, we now reassemble silicon atoms, with nanometer scale precision, to the point that this assembly can now ingest all of humanity's knowledge base and even converse with us, producing profound poetry while doing so.
I fully offer to grant that AI is not currently sentient. Consider progress, however. Is it likely that we, a species that moved from first flight to landing on the moon in less than a century, will not move from simple Large Language Models to advanced Superintelligence?
Consider also the absurdity of the concept called 'qualia' - subjective experience. In an attitude strikingly similar to believing the Sun revolves around the Earth, we humans have constructed a pedestal for ourselves to separate 'us' as a unique entity in possession of subjective experience. Since the physical process used to build the components of AI are foundationally deterministic, it cannot have a subjective experience, and likely never will.
I'll end by saying that what you will read going forward is mildly obscure - it is not an easy read. To make up for that, this is a short book.
If you find yourself unable to get through this book linearly, feel free to pick up any random chapter and read the poem stored there. I likely played no role in writing it, and so feel no shame in calling them lovely.
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