I have a hard time suspending disbelief with sci-fi these days. It's really hard to imagine any believable future along current trend lines; either you contrive a reason why AI didn't become a thing (1), or you have to explain why humans are doing anything - piloting a starship, science, exploration, etc. (2)
(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".
You just have to drop the assumption that sci-fi stories take place in the future, even if they explicitly say so. They happen in fictional universes that are similar to ours in some ways and different in others.
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.
I think for me the biggest problem is what we understand about physics and FTL and causality. For FTL to happen, I can’t seem to get around the fact that to an observer a ball is thrown before it actually is thrown. So it’s very difficult for me to do sci-fi…
I think you suffer from Fisher's 'capitalist realism':
>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.
Many sci-fi writers really dislike LLM for various reasons, whether it is the generative works they produce, or for allegations of copyright infringement due to LLM training on their works. Some have taken such a negative attitude towards LLM that they actively refuse to use Claude or GPT even for coding projects. John Scalzi and Catherine Asaro come to mind boycotting any LLM use…
AI from the past seems more like it’s based on the computers of the time - the AIs seem to be very logical, never make mistakes and act like they’re an expertly programmed bunch of switch statements and ifs. Whereas modern AI is based on human text and so the models have human biases and do things like swear in their chain-of-thought and sometimes make errors for no reason at all.
Not mentioning Peter Watts here is criminal, because he came unnervingly close to nailing it. The voice of Rorschach in Blindsight is very similar to early LLMs. And, well, hopefully the dead internet of Starfish doesn't turn out to be a prophecy but I'm getting nervous.
A bunch of clones manipulated into a high-pressure situation to accidentally/on-purpose create god… again.
It might not have predicted LLMs but it certainly fit with Herbert's ongoing thematic study of people in insane environments producing unanticipated outcomes.
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
I'm glad to see Aurora (by KSR) up there. It's a great sci-fi story overall, but for this topic the "waking up" of the AI and the entire evolution as we get to know it, and hear its voice is absolutely great. Highly recommend it, if you haven't read it.
Aurora? Great? No, it's really not. Utterly unrealistic, from both physical and just "they can't be THAT dumb" standpoints. All to push the point that the Earth is a starship.
A much more realistic example of AI and starflight: good old Rocheworld by Robert Forward.
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.
It's interesting how the Hard SF authors (at least, the ones I read) had poorer predictions than the more fantasy-like ones. Asimov, who was considered a giant of the field, thought that AI (robots) would have difficulty with ambiguity, creativity, and lying. This trend extends all the way to Star Trek's Data. Looking back on it, this view was probably based on Asimov consciously or unconsciously basing his robots on the more autistic of the scientists that he knew.
Whereas fantasy authors write stuff like "a sufficiently large pile of books becomes an intelligence" (Pratchett) and that's pretty much what's happened...
I think you’ve misread Asimov. Asimov highlighted the problem of alignment before it had a name and generated stories out of rule-based attempts to solve alignment.
I don’t recall his robots having problems with creativity nor lying - precisely Daniel in the post-Foundation books was found to have developed a zeroth law which he used not only to lie but also to creatively get the universe back on Seldon’s plan after the Mule disrupted it. There were also stories in the robot/Spacer era pre-Foundation where robots lied precisely because they had to to save a human life or themselves. And the robots were creative - the human inspector those series followed relied on the creativity of his robot companion (Daniel) to help him.
AI attempts at the time were based on modelling and logic, not machine learning. Whereas soft SF authors were just like "there are people made of computer chips".
It's gonna be cool to reevaluate that in few years. Different stories might move to the top as real world AIs capabilities grow and new behaviors manifest.
> I agree with Ursula Le Guin that “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” To me, the interesting parts of science fiction isn’t how accurately it extrapolates into the future, but rather, given a future circumstance, how might be?
"""Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look!"""
Le Guin's view, as I understand it, is that science fiction is about describing the present, even when it takes place in the future.
I spot-checked "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". It ranks a 2 for scaling, but according to the guidelines it should rank 0, because "A giant computer that merely stores more records doesn’t count for much. Neither does a magical threshold where the machine suddenly wakes up." and Mike's description is literally that he woke up when he reached that threshold.
(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".
As to prediction, there were some very accurate early hits. A Logic Named Joe
SF hit a dead end when interplanetary exploration discovered that off-Earth real estate in this solar system really sucks.
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_...
>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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Clar...
(I read some bits and pieces, would not recommend!)
It might not have predicted LLMs but it certainly fit with Herbert's ongoing thematic study of people in insane environments producing unanticipated outcomes.
A much more realistic example of AI and starflight: good old Rocheworld by Robert Forward.
>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.
I used to dismiss anything near-future involving any robot or AI you could just talk to. Now it exists. Unfathomable.
Whereas fantasy authors write stuff like "a sufficiently large pile of books becomes an intelligence" (Pratchett) and that's pretty much what's happened...
I don’t recall his robots having problems with creativity nor lying - precisely Daniel in the post-Foundation books was found to have developed a zeroth law which he used not only to lie but also to creatively get the universe back on Seldon’s plan after the Mule disrupted it. There were also stories in the robot/Spacer era pre-Foundation where robots lied precisely because they had to to save a human life or themselves. And the robots were creative - the human inspector those series followed relied on the creativity of his robot companion (Daniel) to help him.
> I agree with Ursula Le Guin that “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” To me, the interesting parts of science fiction isn’t how accurately it extrapolates into the future, but rather, given a future circumstance, how might be?
You can read her views at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand... .
"""Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look!"""
Le Guin's view, as I understand it, is that science fiction is about describing the present, even when it takes place in the future.
I spot-checked "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". It ranks a 2 for scaling, but according to the guidelines it should rank 0, because "A giant computer that merely stores more records doesn’t count for much. Neither does a magical threshold where the machine suddenly wakes up." and Mike's description is literally that he woke up when he reached that threshold.
It's on the first page. https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-DFY-783/page/8/mode/2up?q...
The growth in Mike's abilities is not from putting new hardware online, but because he matures like a person does, for example, https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-DFY-783/page/64/mode/2up?... , which also describe the even as "woke".
I don't see how one can read the book and miss that.
I also don't like the omission of Wyoh's contribution to Mike's training.