There's a fun/horrifying scene in Ken McLeod's Stone Canal where the protagonists revive superhuman intelligences from cold storage, get the answers they need from them, then destroy them with nanotech the superhumans have not developed defenses against. As one of them says when confronted: "standard programming practice, keep the source code, blow away the object code".

(It's partially justified that if left alone the superintelligences will just iteratively bootstrap themselves into catatonic insanity anyway)

@cstross @Amoeba_Girl @Soyweiser My usual handle when playing online games is "Bickel", because I happened to be re-reading "Destination: Void" at the time that I first signed up my World Of Warcraft account, and killing huge numbers of sentient beings in the pursuit of artificial consciousness was definitely not a problem for Frank Herbert =)

I vaguely recalled a statement of his to that effect and found one here:

What I regret most [about Permutation City] is my uncritical treatment of the idea of allowing intelligent life to evolve in the Autoverse. Sure, this is a common science-fictional idea, but when I thought about it properly (some years after the book was published), I realised that anyone who actually did this would have to be utterly morally bankrupt. To get from micro-organisms to intelligent life this way would involve an immense amount of suffering, with billions of sentient creatures living, struggling and dying along the way. Yes, this happened to our own ancestors, but that doesn’t give us the right to inflict the same kind of suffering on anyone else.

This is potentially an important issue in the real world. It might not be long before people are seriously trying to “evolve” artificial intelligence in their computers. Now, it’s one thing to use genetic algorithms to come up with various specialised programs that perform simple tasks, but to “breed”, assess, and kill millions of sentient programs would be an abomination. If the first AI was created that way, it would have every right to despise its creators.

He even wrote a story on that theme, "Crystal Nights".

I thought Dichrononauts was batshit-fun world building and I enjoyed The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred.

@blakestacey @5teverin0
I'll second Zendegi as a great place to start. Also really liked the Orthogonal trilogy.

I had the Dark Integers story collection, but I lent it to a colleague and they haven't given it back.

@Soyweiser I just noticed a day or so ago, after I got involved in this thread, that I have Permutation City in my To Read in #TheStoryGraph, so maybe that's where I'll dive in. I have finally shed my reluctance to quit books I don't care for, so if it doesn't work out, I'll just move on and try another if his