Founder connections
- Demis HassabisRead and praisedHassabis calls Diaspora amazing in his own 14 July 2023 reply. He says he read Permutation City first and suggests that order, while allowing that his view may reflect his own reading order. His edition is unknown.Source
Summary
Greg Egan follows Yatima, a digital person, through a future in which people can live in computers or biological bodies. A stellar disaster drives the surviving communities to investigate a danger that their models did not predict.
Their journey connects questions about identity with mathematical discovery, physics and the survival of different forms of life. This is speculative fiction. The selected record uses the 2015 Night Shade paperback, not a known Hassabis edition.
Why read it Our view
Use the story to ask how a group detects a failure in its model and warns people who do not share its assumptions. Its digital lives also offer questions about identity and consent; the imagined physics is not evidence for a product claim.