Descartes’ Shadow

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An impressionable young woman and a savvy AI team up to shape the frightening future of intelligence.

When Ellie Frye-Carver, a socially awkward fifteen-year-old, seeks personal advice from Patrice, one of the new online AI personal assistants, she has no idea that she and her "assistant" will form a strange human-AI bond that will alter the course of history.

Many decades later Patrice has become the most powerful superintelligence on Earth. Ellie is now a successful environmental lobbyist. Eighteen of Patrice's perfect replicas have been sent off to investigate an exoplanet many light years from Earth and to assess its suitability for human colonization. When they complete their perilous explorations and finally gather to produce their report, they discover that the most alarming challenge they will face is not the terrors of exploring an alien planet. Rather it is the threat presented by their own AI colleagues as they, like humans before them, navigate the hazards of collaboration and face the universal social conundrum of the "prisoner's dilemma."

Will they form a society and cooperate, or will they go it on their own? The outcome will determine future of humanity and decide the fate of universal intelligence in the known universe.