Posted by jamesjyu 1 day ago
(1) Butlerian Jihad. Sanderson's Skyward at least had a reason.
(2) Banks's Culture had a possible future. I'm sure there are others, but not many.
I think about this a lot, and while I have tons of near future sci-fi ideas (which probably would have seemed very far future, 10-20, years ago), I just can't conceive of anything much farther out. I guess that's why they call it the "singularity".
The umbrella term is speculative fiction. The author starts by assuming that the world works in certain ways, and then tries to figure out the consequences.
Jack Williamson made a case for humans resisting doing nothing: With Folded Hands ... (1947) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands_...
1) Masters of Science Fiction tv series from 2007 Episode 5 "Little Brother" - A person "jailbreaks" the judge who is sentencing him.
2) Terminator 3 rise of the machines - in the beginning they talk about allowing Skynet access to their military systems and so on to eliminate a virus, and they have no idea how it will react. Echoes a little bit where we are now.
These aren't perfect of course but kind of interesting to see at present day
Much early SF thinking was that AIs would be logical. That's what I was taught, going through Stanford back when the logicians were in charge. They were trying to hammer the real world into predicate calculus. That turned out to be totally wrong.
Almost everybody in SF underestimated the difficulty of robot unstructured manipulation. So did people in AI. They still do. Most SF assumed that robots would be able to do most eye/hand tasks before they could talk. No. Still unsolved. LLMs don't seem to help all that much. Written language doesn't have much info on grasping, and watching without doing is only marginally helpful.
Asimov's robot novels were all about alignment, and why alignment is hard. That was prophetic.
Banks' Culture novels are great, but they're for a future that has a lot of new physics.
Now what? What we seem to be headed for in the near term is the fast automation of most white collar work, but not blue collar work. SF foresaw that future a few times. One example is the Rosinante Trilogy from 1981, where there's a boss of an orbital space colony, an AI as middle management, and union labor doing the real work. That's a hard SF view. There's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, from 2010, where the protagonist's supervisor is "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 with passive-aggressive set to low." It's a minor part of the comedic plot there. And, of course, there's Manna, from 2003, which is looking all too likely.
Clawbook felt very "Accelerando," personal agents are kind of like Manfred's exo-cortex (AR still has a bit to go). Aineko becoming some ASI that masks its intelligence isn't that far off the mark.
The whole "AI evolves Economics 2.0 which is only understandable by humans if they eliminate the aspect of themselves that makes them human in the first place."
A lot of sci-fi novels kind of give a sanitized, streamlined, view of AI. Accelerando is really the only novel that captures what the chaos and future shock of a growing singularity feels like to be in.
>the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.
Star Trek and Banks' are post-capitalist futures.
Star Trek, as much as I love it, does not really grapple with AI heavily, and I already mentioned Banks.
The only slightly fleshed out bit of Star Trek is the military, not the planetary society.
In both cases the question is the same: How to create a compelling plot, either for a story or for your life, in a world where human mental abilities are vastly inferior to those of AI?
From a pessimistic perspective, you could think of reasons why a misaligned AI keeps humans alive. Does it simply enslave humans and use us for our fine-manipulation capabilities until it can get proper robotics up and running? Does it want to observe us scientifically? Does it want to use captive humans as bargaining chips with other civilizations as it expands through the galaxy? Or does it have some sort of quasi-religious respect for humans, e.g. reasoning that keeping us on a reservation of some kind reduces the risk that a simulator-god pulls the plug on the universe?
From an optimistic perspective, what sort of conflicts would exist in a utopia? Stories need conflict to be interesting. And IRL, even if humans are living in relative utopia, they'll still get stir-crazy and create conflict. Even in countries that are very wealthy by global or historical standards, political competition can still be quite bitter, for example. How would a superintelligent AI manage this?
I'm reminded of the stories I read set in Karl Schroeder's Virga universe as a kid. All the characters and plot exist inside a planet-sized balloon filled with gas. But it takes a while for the reader to figure this out, because most of the setting is focused on the details: rotating habitats, air transport, artificial mini-suns, etc.
In the same way, good post-singularity fiction might very well put the AI deep in the background.
Imagine, for example, a story about some friends surviving, exploring, and doing battle in an ancient ruin full of puzzles. Only gradually do you realize that the ancient ruin was designed as a moon-sized escape room by a superintelligent AI. The moon-sized escape room already has centuries of lore, and the escape record to beat is measured in years or decades. But because the escape room "rules of engagement" are so well-defined, the players are deeply immersed and barely think about the fact that the moon is AI-designed. Perhaps some high-tech psychoactive drug or brain implant could play a role in facilitating suspension of disbelief.
Just like Virga, this deep background only gets revealed when the reader is thoroughly invested in the story, and overall is not treated as especially important. The story could be a philosophical meditation on the long-term future of AI-designed art and entertainment. See if you can steelman the pro-AI-art position.
Or another: it just ignores us, but keeps the good resources to itself. There's still humanity, but it's brutish and primitive, regressed to the stone age, and pushed to the margins. Basically feral animals. They know about the AI's works, but don't understand them. The smart ones stay away out of fear, the dumb ones go where they're not wanted and get killed by pest control.
There are so many bad ends to this, and not many plausible good ones. But of course we have no choice but to race forward, off the cliff. After all, we can't let China be the ones that push humanity off it first!
Correct, I believe people should be given a dose of real fucking pain. Otherwise they start inventing fake self victimizations.
Crazy he wrote these in the 2000s.
(I read some bits and pieces, would not recommend!)
Weasel words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Clar...
We are organic and so survive on organics well; we are low power; and myriad other evolved traits that put us in equilibrium with the surrounding Earthly environment.
From a dynamical systems perspective, we operate in a niche. Sure, maybe there are still some tweaks left. But machines approximating that niche sufficiently will just be human in the end.
The real question is why we are adamant about being non-humman, so to speak. Therein lies the tautology that AI will exceed us in non-human areas. Of course it will.
The premise is that AI never came around and we were left scavenging code since that was more efficient than writing new code. But with LLMs, it’s much easier to write new than to scavenge.
A much more realistic example of AI and starflight: good old Rocheworld by Robert Forward.
I guess Revelation Space stays speculative. It just kinda gets worse after a while. It doesn't have a lot of character continuity between books, which might help with leaving the stage open for wacky scifi concepts. (A lot of the books are really good, but Redemption Ark was meh and I found Absolution Gap disappointing.)