Consciousness is a liability.

Watts doesn't argue this — he mechanizes it through Jukka Sarasti, a Firefly and predatory intelligence without introspection, who runs circles around the conscious crew because he acts without the paralyzing overhead of self-doubt, moral calculation, or the need to understand why he's doing what he's doing.

He simply does. Meanwhile Siri, the narrator, is crippled by the very thing that makes him human — the ability to observe himself observing, to question whether his observations matter, to feel the weight of futility.

This is already happening in organizational design. The pressure toward "streamlined" decision-making, "flat" hierarchies, and "autonomous" systems is pressure toward Sarasti-like behavior — remove deliberation, trust the algorithm, execute without reflection. We call it agility.

Siri survives because he's broken enough to question Sarasti's competence, but his consciousness is treated as a bug. His introspection saves the mission, yet the book offers no indication that this matters morally to anyone — the competent thing won, and that's the prediction Watts actually made: not that we'll encounter aliens who outthink us, but that we'll voluntarily become them because unconsciousness looks like efficiency.