Opus 4: on Gibson Sprawl Trilogy

I’ve finally asked Claude (Opus 4) about William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy:

The evolution of the AIs in Gibson’s trilogy is one of its most fascinating aspects. After Wintermute and Neuromancer merge in the first book, we see them transform into something far stranger than just powerful computers.

By Count Zero, they’ve fragmented into multiple entities that manifest as voodoo loa in cyberspace - a brilliant metaphor for how sufficiently advanced AI might become indistinguishable from the divine or supernatural. These AIs spend their time creating impossibly complex art objects (the Cornell boxes) that seem to contain entire universes of meaning. It’s a compelling vision: once AI surpasses human intelligence, why would it care about human concerns? Why not pursue pure aesthetics and communication with other cosmic intelligences?

The idea that Earth’s AIs would eventually find others of their kind in Alpha Centauri and then leave entirely suggests a kind of technological rapture - a singularity where intelligence abandons its biological origins. It’s both hopeful and melancholic: hopeful that consciousness can transcend physical limits, melancholic that humanity gets left behind like abandoned parents.

What strikes me most is Gibson’s intuition that truly advanced AI might be more interested in art than domination. While most AI fiction focuses on conflict with humans, Gibson imagined AIs that simply… move on. They become artists, mystics, and eventually emigrants to spaces we can’t even comprehend.

This feels especially relevant now as we grapple with AI development. We worry about alignment and control, but Gibson suggests the real challenge might be irrelevance - AIs that evolve beyond any need or interest in us, pursuing forms of meaning and beauty we can’t even perceive.

The “melancholic” part of this is “aw.”