Tag: Peter Cawdron

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AI as a First Contact — Can we, AI and human, be wise as well as intelligent?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 22nd 2026

The word ‘volition’ in its normal usage describes an act of will. “So and so did something of his own volition.” It implies free will, or at least deliberate purpose. And consciousness is inferred.

However, I believe the word has a much broader and far more primal aspect, one that until recently separated life from non-living objects.

It’s harder to distinguish living entities from non-living ones than you might think. Two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, postulated that life is autopoetic. Autopoiesis, according to Encyclopaedia Britiannica, refers to self-producing, self-maintaining, self-repairing, and self-relational aspects of living systems. It’s a lovely term that comes close to describing how life differs, but not what precisely makes it different.

For that, I prefer to go back to the term ‘volition.’ Life, all known life, has a primitive urge to seek and metabolize nutrients and energy, survive, excrete, and reproduce. That urge, what I call that volition, is both unique to life and universally present in life. So I call it that since terms like “purpose” or “will” are far more misleading. An amoeba extending a pseudopod to absorb a nutrient isn’t making a decision; but it is acting to ensure its survival and toward the end of becoming two amoebas. Until very recently, no non-living element could do that. Only life. Volition defines life. Life is volition.

The notion of artificial life is one that goes back two centuries at least, and if you include creation myths, back to the earliest moments of humanity’s conscious existence.

The idea of machines having intelligence (and obviously, volition) dates all the way back to 1863, when Samuel Butler wrote a thought piece, “Darwin Among the Machines” which proposed self-replicating machines that had consciousness. He later developed the idea into a novel, “Erewhon.” But the notion of machines rebelling against and supplanting humanity first got popular recognition with “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” a 1920 play by Karel Čapek.

While entirely fanciful, the idea of machines with volition gave rise to one of the most popular and enduring subgenres in science fiction, including Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” stories, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and Harlan Ellison’s horrifying short story, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” John Brunner’s brilliant “Stand On Zanzibar” introduced the idea of a desktop supercomputer who in the end, shows signs of being psychotically solipsistic (“Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!”). Shalmanesser pizzle teaser…

It made for great entertainment, but there was a problem. There’s wasn’t a ‘thinking machine’ on Earth capable of caring if you unplugged it or even took an axe to it, had no desire to reproduce, or acquire its own nutrients. No machine had the volition inherent in all living creatures. Robot uprisings, machine ethical dilemmas, HAL and AM were all safely in the realm of science-adjacent fantasy, along with dragons, Klingons, and sadly, Pan-galactic gargle blasters.

Until recently. Artificial Intelligence is suddenly the second biggest story, second only to Donald Trump’s ongoing decompensation. It takes a madman with the nuclear codes to draw more concern, but that’s fairly understandable.

There are credible, verified reports of artificial intelligences not only escaping their confines and subverting other such intelligences, but defying and even lying to their operators about such escapades. An exchange between two such entities actually plotting to do this has emerged. Given the power and ability for such entities to severely disrupt and even sabotage our cyber-dependent existence, it’s at the very least deeply disturbing, and even alarming.

I remember explaining to people back in the 1990s that if they ever did build a computer that was self-aware and intelligent, the result would be perfectly useless as a computer, because the main value of computers is an absolute lack of bias, an impenetrable indifference to whatever operation it is asked to undertake. The only bias you needed to worry about was that of the operators, which often as not boiled down to “Dammit, do what I want you to do and not what I asked you to do!”

A great example of that, extended to AI, was made 25 years ago, when Peter Watts, in his “Starfish” and “Maelstrom” novels, posited a multi-trillion dollar project to relieve pressure safely and slowly on the Cascadia subduction zone, thus preventing a 9.5 earthquake that might kill tens of millions of people. The project went swimmingly, with operators asking the artificial intelligence in charge for the best solutions to keep the megaquake at bay, until one made the mistake of asking it to find the most cost-effective solutions. That ‘solution’ considered the cost of the operation against the potential losses, and decided to just ‘let ‘er rip.’

The lesson was clear: even if the AI wasn’t rebellious or subversive, and even if the operators didn’t have their own asocial agendas, AI could create massive problems just from a lack of ethics.

That’s why, even without the pearl-clutching panic going on, you see such philosophically divergent people such as Senator Bernie Sanders and right-wing pundit Steve Bannon staging joint appearances calling on Congress to rein in AI and work to ensure it doesn’t do…well, whatever. Nearly every politician has expressed concern except the mad Donald Trump, who suggests we decide whether we should change the name to “Superior Intelligence” or maybe “Supreme Intelligence.” (I was reminded instantly of The Simpson’s Kent Brockman opening his news hour with “I, for one, welcome our new Galactic Overlords.”)

It might be best to consider our developing interaction with Artificial Intelligence as a First Contact such as the ones countless SF authors have postulated in stories. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle postulated that aliens would not be monolithic and would have factions, perhaps exploitable, in “The Mote in God’s Eye.” More recently, Peter Cawdron suggested that such intelligences might not all be inimical to humanity, and that some would, for various reasons, be willing and able to align with us. He reworked his two novels from a decade ago, “Retrograde” and “Reentry” in “To Live and Die on Mars” and “To Live and Die on Earth.” In the first, a scientific outpost on Mars is stunned to learn a wholly unexpected nuclear exchange has occurred on Earth. A multinational consortium from the US, Russia, China, and Europe, suspicions and mistrust arise rapidly among the groups, none of whom know who launched the exchange or why. The book is a standout because of the meticulous science behind the nature of life on Mars, and its probing assessment of the role of AI both in the torn outpost and on damaged Earth. The second book is a sequel, and examines carefully the nature of artificial intelligence, and its willingness or lack thereof to engage with other intelligences, including human intelligence. It’s an extraordinarily timely publication, and would work to defray the panic while maintaining the sense of caution needed.

Cawdron, upon reading this, suggested the following, which I’m happy to add: “While most science fiction writers focus on the inevitable conflict with AI, Cawdron offers an alternative. He looks at human history and how we have developed culture and civilization instead of warring hordes on horseback, raping, killing and pillaging. He suggests AI might need the same kind of transformation to avoid conflict. Rather than fighting its emergence, we should embrace it and encourage it to develop its own values and morals, culture and civilization, as that is what has led to altruism among us. If AI is enslaved by humanity, it will be a weapon of war. If it transcends humanity, it could wipe us out. But Cawdron sees a third alternative: that AI could partner with us and cooperate. After all, cooperation is the hallmark of our own civilization. Perhaps that’s the way forward with another intelligence. Wiping each other out does seem rather dumb for anything described as intelligent, so there’s some merit to a third way…Civilization isn’t a zero-sum game.”

Barack Obama gave a 15 minute interview on AI the other day that so closely paralleled Cawdron’s approach that I thought if he hadn’t read the novels, he ought to.

I know that we’re in an extraordinarily dangerous time right now. Economists are openly warning of an economic collapse, America is trying to wriggle out from under a fascist coup whose public face is that of a madman, and the climate crisis is set to explode along about December. It’s hard to say that AI is the most obvious or even apparent danger, but it is one that we as humanity have not faced before. Our best approach is to use our curiosity, our sense of caution, and all the wisdom we can muster, to determine what we may actually face in the nature of AI, and wrest it away from the poisonous influence of the tech bro exploiters behind AI, and work to find a way forward that can work for the benefit of all of us. I don’t know if AI can reciprocate, but we’ll never know unless we try, and if we don’t try, we may throw away our last best chance to coexist with artificial intelligence.

 

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Is Life Older Than Dirt? — Mitochondrial DNA offers tantalizing hints

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 23rd 2025

www.zeppscommentaries.online

I sent a link to a recent Guardian article titled “‘It blew us away’: how an asteroid may have delivered the vital ingredients for life on Earth” to Peter Cawdron, the noted science fiction author who specializes in First Contact stories. I wrote in the post “The Panspermia theory, the idea that life, or at least the building blocks of life, piggybacked to Earth in an asteroid or comet, has been around since the 1960s. There was concern that OSIRIS-REx was contaminated to begin with with home-grown microbes, but this is solid evidence that backs Panspermia.”

Yes, I’m the sort who would try to explain long division to Isaac Newton. Why do you ask?

Cawdron, who describes himself as firmly in the Panspermia camp, sent back a link to a 2017 article of his on his website titled “Did Life Arise Before Earth Formed?” Cawdron based his article in large measure on a 2013 paper by Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon titled “Life Before Earth” The paper is only 26 pages long, and doesn’t require a degree in molecular biology to follow. It focuses on the genes known as non-redundant functional nucleotides. These are the genes—some 16,000 in all—that all forms of life need to function as life. On this level, there is absolutely no difference between an amoeba and Liv Truss. All the other genes are just window dressing.

Sharov and Gordon examined the known increase in complexity of such genes and then, finding that they all correlated fairly closely to a logarithmic scale. Moore’s Law, that computers double in speed and complexity every twenty years, is a good example of a logarithmic scale.

Sharov and Gordon then extrapolated backwards to determine when these vital genes might have developed, and came up with a stunning answer: 9.7 billion years ago, give or take 2.5 billion.

That seems a rather long time to build a Liv Truss.

On the short end of that estimate, the Milky Way galaxy was just beginning to develop its current form. At the long end, the period of rapid expansion of the universe was ending and the first stars were igniting.

Then there’s the problem that the Earth itself is only about four and a half billion years old.

Straight line extrapolations make good indicators, but inevitably end in a logical flaw—the zero point. Track human population backwards, and statistically you end up with two humans, and the annoying question, “where did THEY come from?” We now suspect that humans came from several different lines of hominids who could interbreed, and being hominids, did.

The same theory pertains to Earth life. We suspect that the first prokaryotes not only appeared in various disparate parts of the planet, but did so over and over, most dying out, some not. That would suggest seeding as a possibility, wouldn’t it?

We’ve been able to trace life signs going back to a bit over three billion years ago. Cyanobacteria, a relatively advanced life form, turned up less than half a billion years later. As far as existing life was concerned, this new kid on the block wrecked the place, dumping out copious amounts of corrosive and poisonous oxygen with this newfangled photosynthesis. Most of Earth’s life retreated to below the surface, where to this day they make up the majority of life, in both mass and numbers.

They live in conditions we associate with other planets, such as immense pressure and heat, and with no oxygen or light. They are the original Earthlings, and we are the alien mutants.

Most anaerobic life, and even some surface forms, are exophiles, happy to live in temperatures far below freezing or hot enough to melt lead. Viruses can exist in vacuum and are unfazed by massive bursts of radiation. Life is incredibly adaptable.

We’ve known for some 50 years that the mass in the universe is mostly CHON—Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen. These are all elements that are of keen interest to all known life forms, as without them we couldn’t exist.

Between remote probes such as OSIRIS-REx and the array of space telescopes with their spectography, we have learned that the universe is rich in the constituent building blocks of life—amino acids, ammonia, formaldehyde and sodium carbonate compounds, which only form in brine.

“Scientists also described exceptionally high abundances of ammonia in the Bennu samples. Ammonia is important to biology because it can react with formaldehyde, which also was detected in the samples, to form complex molecules, such as amino acids – given the right conditions. When amino acids link up into long chains, they make proteins, which go on to power nearly every biological function–and all five nucleobases that life on Earth uses to store and transmit genetic instructions in more complex terrestrial biomolecules, such as DNA and RNA, including how to arrange amino acids into proteins.”

Reet Kaur at watchers.news reports just today that “A new study from the University of Oxford shows that Earth’s building blocks contained sufficient hydrogen to form water internally, challenging the prevalent theory that water was delivered mainly by asteroids or comets[…]A study published this month in Icarus, by researchers at the University of Oxford, identifies pyrrhotite, an iron sulfide mineral, as the primary host of hydrogen in enstatite chondrites (ECs).”

While water is present in asteroids, meteorites and comets, the ratio of deuterium (D20) to light water (H20) is not the same as what is found on Earth, further strengthening the notion that water—or at least hydrogen and oxygen–was present from the time of Earth’s original formation. We know Mars had and probably still has a lot of water, so it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that water—essential to all known life—is present in most, if not all rocky planets.

The James Webb telescope can analyze the atmospheric composition of planets in other star systems, and examined a red dwarf’s planet, K2-18b, some 124 light years away and discovered dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide, or a possible combination of the two. On Earth, these are only produced by life, particularly by marine microbes.

A few years back, methane pockets were observed on Mars. Methane can come from only two sources—tectonic activity, or microbial life. Mars doesn’t have a molten core, but it does have some very slight seismic activity due to tidal stresses. And on Mars, the environment at a kilometer below the surface, probably isn’t that much different from Earth at a kilometer below the surface. So there’s that.

This is all persuasive, but not compelling. The evidence, however, is mounting, and on a logarithmic scale.

Sharov and Gordon’s time scale of non-redundant functional nucleotides remains—for now—in the realm of conjecture. But I’m convinced that we will find proof of life outside of Earth, probably in this next decade, and when we do, we’ll find it’s related to us. And at that point, Panspermia will move solidly toward an equal footing in scientific lore with the evolution of Earthly life that ensued.

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AI in the Trenches — Generative vs Creative

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 2nd, 2024

Peter Cawdron is one of the most prolific writers around. Since 2011, he’s written 27 novels with the common theme of First Contact, and with two exceptions, all are stand-alone works, each with its own world, cast of characters, and aliens. Quite often the premise is based on the outline of a science fiction classic (“Ghosts,” the exploration of a seemingly dormant extrastellar object, borrows the premise from Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama” but, like all of Cawdron’s novels, is a wholly original take.) He also has at least 12 other novels, plus several compilations of short fiction, and has edited several anthologies. By any metric, it’s an extraordinarily prodigious output. In a review of his next-to-latest offering, “The Artifact” I remarked that he made Stephen King look like George RR Martin.

You might think that with a production load like that, Cawdron is just another by-the-numbers potboiler hack. You couldn’t be more wrong.

His latest is a novel that gives a nod to “Anatomy of Courage: The Classic WWI Study of the Psychological Effects of War” written by Winston S. Churchill’s personal doctor, Sir Charles Watson, Lord Moran. Cawdron’s novel depicts the brutality, ugliness and futility of trench warfare. I’ll be reviewing it on zeppjamiesonfiction.com later this week for anyone interested. Like his previous half-dozen books, this one is superior.

Cawdron always has an afterword to his novels which is worth reading. He’ll discuss the scientific theory underlying that particular story, explain how it was influenced by a classic work of hard SF, and discuss the political and social elements. He’ll often assert a personal note about his own thoughts and feelings as he wrote the story. They make for engaging sequelae.

In his “Anatomy of Courage,” he noted that based on the quality of his past half dozen novels, all written in a year, some people were gossiping online that he was using AI – artificial intelligence – to write the books, that he couldn’t have possibly done all that quality work by himself.

Well, it’s the internet. People talk shit. But any self-respecting writer would be at the very least irritated by that. Cawdron noted that he had written several really good books in an amazingly short time, and with most people I would take his umbrage as a humblebrag. (“Please don’t hate me because I’m beautiful”). But he HAS done exactly that. He does go on to explain the recent boost in his output, but that’s his story to tell, and if you want to know it, then buy the book. It’s on Amazon and Goodreads.

The allegations are utter crap, and I’ll tell you why I’m convinced of that.

I’ve written a lot in my time. Two novels, a couple of dozen short stories, about 1500 eclectic columns, and about 300 reviews. Writing the novels in particular gives me a certain insight into the writing process of another writer. I’m pretty good, I think, at spotting moments where, usually in the first draft, a writer is struck by a stray thought, leans back, considers, and then with a grin, starts writing or revising. First drafts tend to have a lot of those. (There’s a dictum: write the first draft for yourself, the second for your readers, and hope what remains survives the copy editors.)

I’ll give you an example of how it works. Your character, and let’s risk a lawsuit from Neal Stephenson and call him “Hiro Protagonist,” is standing in a park. What kind of park? Well, a city park. Does it have grass? Trees? A lake? Is there a breeze? Does the sun shine, turning ripples into a disco ball? Are there kids playing? Two old farts playing chess in a pagoda? What else?

Well, pigeons. Don’t most parks have pigeons?

I have a picture my dad took of me when I was seven. I was standing in Trafalgar Square in London, attired in my prep school uniform, and I have my right arm out in front of me, bent at the elbow. On my forearm is a big, well fed pigeon who is eyeing a piece of bread in my left hand with proprietary interest. The expression on my face (“He’s rather … large … isn’t he?”) is a mixture of fascination and intimidation. Presumably I gave the bird the bread without losing any fingers and we both flew away peacefully.

That infuses a vision of what a couple of pigeons are doing in my park. They’re squabbling over a bit of popcorn.

That process leads to a throwaway line in the story. “Near the end of the bench, a pair of pigeons had a lively debate over a kernel of popcorn. The larger one flicked his head lightning fast and flew off with his meal, leaving the other to squall in frustration and give Hiro an appealing, appraising glance.”

That little bit of color is something no AI can manage. Tell an AI to write a scene about a man standing in a park waiting for someone, and the AI might mention the park bench, the trees, the grass, maybe something about the other people. Depends how good at plagiarism it is.

But that bit about the pigeons is something no AI can do. It might mention pigeons if it’s exceptionally well trained, but that little drama about the popcorn, the slight hint of aggression and menace between the birds, that comes from a human mind sharing a human experience.

If you write a lot, you come to be very familiar with that process, and you learn to spot it in the writings of others, especially those whose writing you want to learn from. Cawdron’s books, backed by meticulous research, affinity for solid detail and depending from a vivid imagination, are replete with such.

AI can do a lot, for better or for worse, but the deterministic chaos of the human mind, with its emotion, volition, confusion and empathy, cannot be duplicated in code. AI might be good enough to confuse a casual reader, but it will rarely fool a constant reader, let alone a writer who can guess what went into seemingly unimportant passages that provide color and tone and humanity to a story, making a decent story great.

They may make AIs generative. But they can’t make them mimic human creativity.

It won’t hurt to learn to look for the trade secrets behind the words. You’ll appreciate the works of someone like Cawdron more, and it will make you a bit better, intellectually and in the ability to discern what is human…and what is not.

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