A story of first contact, not in space, but in our own oceans with octopuses that have evolved symbolic language and a social structure that enables the generational transfer of knowledge.
While superficially about smart octopuses, the narrative explores questions of sapience across machine AIs, an android, the octopuses, and humankind. It asks how we can possibly communicate and find common ground when language and perception are shaped by radically different physical or digital forms.
In Naylor’s future, people are isolated, lonely, and increasingly dependent on AI therapeutic companions, mirroring our own use of chatbots. He highlights the dangers of an AI echo chamber, telling us what we want to hear, providing no resistance. He advocates instead for genuine human interactions, warts and all. But while this is undeniably valid for his limited AI holograms, when we face the unanswerable question of whether the Turing-level android is sapient or just a stochastic parrot, we lose our scientific certainty and are set adrift.
Drone fishing fleets, scraping the last protein from the seabed, become allegory for the infamous paperclip problem – single-minded machine intelligence autonomously following a goal without alignment, meaning that the very corporation protecting the octopuses is also attacking them. Similarly, lethal swarms of Tibetan war drones with their delegated decision-making, mirror current debates on battlefield autonomy. How will we exert oversight in a future teeming with autonomous AIs? The octopus, with its neurally endowed tentacles, is proposed as a possible metaphor showing us a way forward.
Naylor refuses to propose answers to these debates, and as a result, the ending felt slightly flat, lacking resolution. But he does give us a glimpse into a cognitively diverse future where sapience will be fluid and multi-faceted. The Mountain in the Sea posits no definitions, provides no measures; instead, it suggests that in a future where these epistemic questions remain stubbornly unanswerable by science, communication and tolerance become our ethical imperative.
