Blindsight

Why it’s on the list: Peter Watts’s novel of first contact with something intelligent and not conscious — the novel the current argument about whether intelligence requires awareness keeps landing on.

Where I heard about it

• Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) — in a reply to Ross Douthat on X, February 2026: “It deals with the idea of non-conscious intelligence, and posits that consciousness is an anomaly.”
• Will Manidis’s “most underrated PDF” thread, July 2023 — posted as an answer. See The Most Underrated PDF on the Internet (July 2023).

Connections

• Noah Smith — the recommender.
• Artificial Intelligence — the reason the book has a second life twenty years on.
• Science Fiction