If this were a nonfiction essay, it would be about the concept of understanding consciousness not our own. What stands in the way: much of consciousness is language, but language is dependent on culture and context---what would it mean to have the upper hand if you didn't have hands? Thomas Nagel is cited in this book as asking "What is it like to be a bat?", to make the point that putting ourselves in the shoes of a bat is impossible when we don't have wings, we have nothing like sonar, but we do have feet and wear shoes.

The book is from 2023 because there is now artificial intelligence in everything. A key character in the book is a boat, and some characters have a key problem of determining how to communicate and influence it (see below). We haven't been able to understand octopodes---even other people---so how are we to understand the more sci-fi personalities like robots or aliens, the book asks.

It draws no solid conclusions, which is good because there aren't really conclusions to be drawn, beyond noting all the traps we need to avoid.

Fiction-wise, this is what cyberpunk looks like in 2023, with the usual characters: the hacker who enters a colorful, structured abstract world via terminal, the mega-corporation with sinister intent, the sentient robot, the criminal enterprises taking slaves and destroying the planet. Some but not all of the characters were interesting to me, and I wanted to know what the author was going to do with them. Others were there to teach us about octopodes and sentience, and that's OK.

What does a boat want? There's a jump here, from a robot being able to make decisions via optimization algorithms and a robot wanting. Like the rest of us, the characters readily make the jump without thinking about it. But for fiction, the question is essential! A story is driven by conflict between what characters want, so every character has to have motivation and need. For a few of the characters (we recognize the boat is not really a character), including both a robot and the researcher (Ha) who is more-or-less the lead character, what they want is somewhat amorphous. She wants to learn and protect the environment, but her more social needs are never fully explained beyond a generalized desire for human connection.