I have a hard time reading sci-fi these days because the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting. I have a hard time seeing much other than computers in the future. Maybe stories like the Hyperion Cantos with the AIs in the TechnoCore largely fighting amongst themselves over the future of humanity are still intersting to me.
> the rapid advances of AI have altered or closed off entirely a lot of the futures that I would find most interesting.
Opening them up again is a possible creative move. For example 'Dune', a far future where AIs and computers are banned and highly taboo because they caused too much trouble. Or there's alternate paths from the actual past such as steampunk in which we pushed mechanical engines further instead of switching (!) entirely to electronics.
I agree that opening up opportunities for other futures is good, but I don't think Dune was a good example of that even if you like the story -- Dune simply avoided the issue by assuming the future would implausibly turn into the past and that technology would be rejected and medieval feudalism and centralized religious control would return. A better, more plausible, future would show, as is often the case, that the technology we think is so ground-breaking today, just is integrated into daily life and hardly thought about rather than disappearing (which basically never happens).
Iain Banks still reigns supreme. Throw a couple LLMs in a chat together and they sound similar to his conversations between intelligences (particularly in Excession).
Yeah, with who is doing space exploration being right up there. If it is us it isn’t going to be in our organic bodies, and this renders so much of it irrelevant. Wider society will likely pigeon hole their thinking on that next to concerns about the heat death of the universe, but for a lot of us it is disappointing.
I did wonder about what it would be like embodied as a space probe encountering an alien that had also gone through the same process. That is now the sort of scifi that appeals.
I'd be very interested in any recommendations in that vein. I've been really enjoying the themes of embodiment in the new Marathon, where your body is disposable, woven silk with unfamiliar organs, while your consciousness is totally owned by a corporation.
Imo good sci fi was never really meant to be a technical description of cool technology, but more about how humans interact in specific scenarios dictated by the existence of certain technologies. Star Trek was less about the intricacies of the warp drive and more about "what if humans could interact with hundreds of unique cultures," or "what could human society look like without scarcity?"
There are many stories to tell in the age of AI. I've yet to find a good Luddite novel that explores how the technology might be taken by the commons, rather than hoarded and made to serve capital (the way governments have been). There's plenty of stories to tell around exploring university of ethics once we have a truly non human intelligence to reckon with. Accelerando spent just as much time exploring the legal implications of non-human intelligences as it did the underlying technology.
Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.
It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics. There is of course the whole hard/soft sci-fi continuum that determines just how rooted it is, with soft sci-fi being pure fantasy with sci-fi veneer and hard sci-fi being fantasy that's physically plausible.
As actual science and technology advances and as society changes what we imagine will change. Sci-fi imagined today will either deal with AI and what AI is really shaping up to look like or it will imagine futures where AI has been abandoned for some reason (like Dune).
>Sci-fi is always about the future, or some possible future or alternate world, as imagined in the time it was written, and I think it has to be read that way. It's always about both the present (when it was written) and the future.
In other words, it allows writers to talk about culture with a technological flair. It's still valuable later because it was really about the culture. The tech also enables wild scenarios, that often come true later on.
It's basically fantasy except the magic is, to varying degrees, rooted in real science and physics.
That's a superficial view of both Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Sure, there's a lot of schlock out there which essentially functions as this sort of meaningless escapism for the reader. But proper Sci-Fi and Fantasy is philosophical in a way that makes them radically different, if not diametrically opposed.
Fantasy stories typically depict a society in decay, with evil ascendant, and characters who yearn to return to a time of past innocence. It's ultimately backward looking and conservative. When it functions as social commentary, it's a critique of the alienation and impersonality of modernity.
Science Fiction is forward-looking. It asks "what if" questions about the limitations of our modern society by inviting us to view a society that has been freed from those limitations. It challenges our ideas about human nature. It's ultimately progressive, even when it depicts dystopian governments.
"Why don't most people simply create billion-dollar companies so they can also benefit from tax benefits you can only capture at scale? As long as we make it easy to create billion-dollar companies this should work."
The 2006 book 'Daemon' is a fascinating/terrifying look at this type of malicious AI. Basically, a rogue AI starts taking over humanity not through any real genius (in fact, the book's AI is significantly weaker than frontier LLMs), but rather leveraging a huge amount of $$$ as bootstrapping capital and then carrot-and-sticking humanity into submission.
A pretty simple inner loop of flywheeling the leverage of blackmail, money, and violence is all it will take. This is essentially what organized crime already does already in failed states, but with AI there's no real retaliation that society at large can take once things go sufficiently wrong.
I love Daemon/FreedomTM.[0] Gotta clarify a bit, even though it's just fiction. It wasn't a rogue AI; it was specifically designed by a famous video game developer to implement his general vision of how the world should operate, activated upon news of his death (a cron job was monitoring news websites for keywords).
The book called it a "narrow AI"; it was based on AI(s) from his games, just treating Earth as the game world, and recruiting humans for physical and mental work, with loyalty and honesty enforced by fMRI scans.
For another great fictional portrayal of AI, see Person of Interest[1]; it starts as a crime procedural with an AI-flavored twist, and ended up being considered by many critics the best sci-fi show on broadcast TV.
It was a benevolent AI takeover. It just required some robo-motorcycles with scythe blades to deal with obstacles.
Like the AI in "Friendship is Optimal", which aims to (and this was very carefully considered) 'Satisfy humanity's values through friendship and ponies in a consensual manner.'
Martine: "Artificial Intelligence? That's a real thing?"
Jorunalist: "Oh, it's here. I think an A.I slipped into the world unannounced, then set out to strangle it's rivals in the crib. And I know I'm onto something, because me sources keep disappearing. My editor got resigned. And now my job's gone. More and more, it just feels like I was the only one investigating the story. I'm sorry. I'm sure I sound like a real conspiracy nut."
Martine: "No, I understand. You're saying an Artificial Intelligence bought your paper so you'd lose your job and your flight would be cancelled. And you'd end up back at this bar, where the only security camera would go out. And the bartender would have to leave suddenly after getting an emergency text. The world has changed. You should know you're not the only one who figured it out. You're one of three. The other two will die in a traffic accident in Seattle in 14 minutes."
> A pretty simple inner loop of flywheeling the leverage of blackmail, money, and violence is all it will take. This is essentially what organized crime already does already in failed states
[Western states giving each other sidelong glances...]
PR firms are going to need to have a playbook when an AI decides to start blogging or making virtual content about a company. And what if other AIs latched on to that and started collaborating to neg on a company?
Could you imagine 'negative AI sentiment' and those same AI assistants that manage sales of stock (cause OpenClaw is connected to everything) starts selling a companies stock.
I've gotta come to OPs defense here. In the age of Suno indistinguishable-from-human-quality hits, this whole endeavor was an art piece and more interesting than most human OR AI music I've heard in the past year.
The medium was using the "wrong" tool for the job, which creative musicians do on a regular basis. And the output was so cool, it really felt like a relic from a different era even though it's hyper-modern.
I'm going to blow your mind: people are different! I have lived in several cities in the PNW and New England and now live in Houston metro by choice. It is far easier, more efficient, and more economical for my family which are our priorities. (Also infinitely more diverse, which is a big plus, but doesn't really have anything to do with urban planning). We like it a lot here.
Houston can be very cheap, but it comes with the steep cost of having to live in Houston.
I'm being harsh, Houston isn't completely terrible. There is a lot of culture and diversity. But you can't really get to it because everything is too far, and you're already tired from commuting 10 hours that week.
IMO that is different than rank-and-file. My theory is that once you make a certain amount of money you run a high risk of becoming divorced from reality.
> Yes, a tired doctor sucks. But a tired doctor who already has the patient's state loaded into their head may still be better than doctor who is completely fresh in both senses.
AI fixes this. Imagine the boot time of loading a patient's state from dozens of labs and files vs. a summary that gets you to exactly what they're going to end up remembering anyways. And if a doctor finds something interesting that the AI doesn't flag, they should be flagging it in the chart for the next doctor anyways.
In my experience, AI summarization is a pretty lame application. I don’t really need a block of potentially wrong, rephrased text. I’ve got a feeling that the same applies to healthcare.
I’m not super familiar with moon, but I think it’d be fair to say mise started out solving the tool problem where moon solved the build problem first. I’d expect both to be more fleshed out than the other in both departments.
You could probably use mise tools for moon builds, or proto with mise tasks too if you wanted to.
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