Greg Egan delivers a story filled with math problems that manages to be entertaining despite me not following half of it, with a premise that is basically a 1:1 analogy of the potential impact on the job market from AI models.

Clarkesworld November 2025

The premise of this story is a new technology called Cyranos that works sort of like an AI integrated in their brain. We follow Vince who gets the device, and Jamie who refrains from doing so. The two end up on different team in a math problem solving competition, which works to explore the different approaches and ethical themes on human intelligence versus AI-assisted problem solving.

The analogy to current AI models is easy to see here, and Egan makes good use of tricky math problems to show these differences. I honestly didn’t follow all of the math problems here, but Egan is great at making everyone understand the essence of what is going on, without the need to follow the exact deductions.

As such the story doesn’t provide any clear-cut conclusions on the limits to or threats from AI in the working economy, because there aren’t any, but the it does showcase how it relates to economic inequality and especially the potential shortcomings of AI when dealing with problems that have multiple best-case solutions with their own tradeoffs.

I don’t Egan quite reaches his normal high here, but I do hope he writes more stories dealing with LLMs, because I think his knowledge and skills as a science fiction writer is one that can give unique perspectives into that.

Read in Clarkesworld November 2025
Rating: 3+