/lit/ - Literature

Yukikaze.

There's something about it that just feels timeless. The occupation of Faery and the war with the JAM could've been constructed as a commentary on war, but that's more an unintentional element, second to the primary themes of the idea of human and inhuman; a conflict where man, with the aid of machine intelligences of its own design (albeit not necessarily of like mind), is seeking to keep at the very least a stalemate against an utterly incomprehensible and decisively inhuman alien... well, it's hard to say entity, or force, or just ascribe any sort of conceptualization to it.

But it's the machine intelligences that really got me. It left me feeling that the idea that we can totally predict and understand a true Artificial Intelligence is nothing more than human conceit; in fact, AI would be a misnomer for these things, which would operate according to their own perspective and world view conceptualizations that would lead them to act in ways incomprehensible to us humans. I left feeling that the field of AI may be best tackled not by trying to simply make an intelligent agent, but to foster the growth of... well, I'd use the term "digital organism." Whatever it will be, it's likely going to make Turing roll in his grave, being something obviously inhuman and yet very much alive... in some sense.

But yeah, Yukikaze.
And its followup Good Luck Yukikaze.
And I'd presume, if it would ever get translated, Unbroken Arrow Yukikaze.

Amazing shit.

Yukikaze (Chohei Kanbayashi) and Roadside Picnic (the Strugatsky Brothers).

Highly recommend the former and its followup Good Luck Yukikaze, they provide some interesting philosophical insight into the difference between what is human and what is inhuman.

Also the fact they paint machine intelligences as being their own sort of thing rather than simulacra of a human intelligence is really interesting, and creates some very interesting dilemmas within the narrative as the normal relationship of man being the master to the computer's servant only exists at the superficial level; the AI systems' conceptualization of the reality in which they inhabit lead to them appearing at times incomprehensible to the average human, and thus leads to such situations as

>award a snowplow driver a medal way beyond his line of duty to push him over the edge, make him a liability during a runway clearing job when he starts hitting the booze hard, have the autonomous gun systems shred his plow apart when it becomes an obstacle for an emergency landing, and then establish the whole ordeal as a precedence for removing the human element and moving to autonomous systems

Yukikaze

>/lit/ will never acknowledge the existence of Sentou Yousei Yukikaze as a legitimate work of Japanese science fiction

The author, Chohei Kambayashi, is sometimes noted as being like the Philip Dick of Japan.

But really, I just wanted to know if /lit/ knew about it, and if it's down with Japanese sci-fi.