I gave up on this book, but I still enjoyed it. The 300 pages I did read were jam-packed with ideas. Basically it asks the horrifying question on what would happen if octopuses acquired our level of intelligence. This I consider a really big concern. Because let’s say dolphins did, or parrots, they don’t have opposable digits, so basically nbd. But octopi have four times our number of opposable digits! Its set in the far future, and is one of the few really believable far futures I’ve ever read. There’s a slave ship for scraping the last protein from the ocean, which has slaves on it because they are cheaper than robots, there’s a cyborg whose feelings are hurt because academics can’t agree if he is conscious or not, there’s customized hologram boyfriends, and that’s before the octopi get super intelligent.
There’s also a cool part about how our brain floats around in total dark, and our whole sense of the world comes from electrical impulses sent to it in its black chamber. I love this image.