The sci-fi story that I constantly find myself thinking about when I read about real-world AI developments is Ra, by qntm/Sam Hughes: https://qntm.org/ra

Iain M Banks' Culture series seem to have got a lot right.

Nothing before 2017? What about:

  - Sally, Asimov 1953 (spot on with Waymo)
  - I, Robot etc, Asimov
  - HAL 2001 A Space Odyssey
  - any Iain M. Banks Culture novel

There's also "Destination: Void" by Frank Herbert.

Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age (a young lady's illustrated primer) ≈ LLMs + Intelligent UI (OpenAI)

This doesn't seem accurate at all. E.g.

> A high-scoring story shows readers moved by machine literature, editors publishing it, an audience enjoying its music, or critics taking the work seriously.

How is this a criterion for LLMs being sci-fi AI? If anything, opposite is true. It seems that the author is comparing his own sci-fi image of LLMs with sci-fi. Or Claude's vision of itself, I guess, since this is all vibe-written except the initial few lines.

This goes so hard with numbers without even a passing mention of how the author actually read the books. AI wrote this.

vernor vinge bubble in time series gives a lot of food for thought without overly patronizing or moralizing

I think the score for Colossus: The Forbin Project is too low. There is nothing in the film that contradicts the notion of Colossus being a very, very large LLM. Although I think the film is even better than the book by D. F. Jones, only the latter mentions how, despite being created specifically for US national defense, Colossus is also fed unrelated data including Shakespeare's sonnets, because its creators do not know if it could be important.

>The two machines begin with arithmetic and soon communicate through mathematics their engineers can’t follow. That’s the most relevant prediction here: machine intellectual activity racing ahead of the people supervising it.

This misses the specificity of the scene's prediction. Colossus and Guardian are basically speaking in the style of the super-dense, almost incomprehensible-to-human chain of thought that LLMs indulge in nowadays. One might also point to the just-released news of LLMs easily seeing patterns, incomprehensible to humans, in model weights.

There's a few smaller sci fi stories that are not covered here, like the crystal society stories. That one was deliberately written to explore AI using modern AI architecture. Not popular, but very accurate.