While I strive to finish my own book on Artificial Intelligence - filling in what I consider to be about fifty perceptual gaps in current discussions,* I try to keep up with what's being said in a fast-changing landscape and ideascape. Take this widely bruited essay by Niall Ferguson in The Times, which begins with a nod to science fiction...
...asserting that ONLY my esteemed colleague, the brilliant Neal Stephenson, could possibly have peered ahead to see aspects of this era... despite there having been dozens of thoughtful or prophetic SF tales before Snow Crash (1992) and some pretty good ones after.
Not so much cyberpunk, which only occasionally tried for tech-accurate forecasting, instead of noir-inspired cynicism chic, substituting in Wintermute AI for the Illuminati or Mafia or SPECTRE....
... No, I'm thinking more of Stephenson and Greg Bear and Nancy Kress... and yeah, my own Earth (1990) and later Existence (2013), which speculated on not just one kind of AI, but dozens....
... as I will in my coming book, tentatively titled: Our Latest Children - Advice about – and for – our natural, AI and hybrid heirs.
*(especially gaps missed by the geniuses who are now making these systems.)
Anyway, here's one excerpt from Existence dealing with the topic. And ain't it a WAIST?
== WAIST ==
Wow, ain’t it strange that—boffins have been predicting that truly humanlike artificial intelligence oughta be “just a couple of decades away…” for eighty years already?
Some said AI would emerge from raw access to vast numbers of facts. That happened a few months after the Internet went public.
But ai never showed up.
Others looked for a network that finally had as many interconnections as a human brain, a milestone we saw passed in the teens, when some of the crimivirals—say the Ragnarok worm or the Tornado botnet—infested-hijacked enough homes and fones to constitute the world’s biggest distributed computer, far surpassing the greatest “supercomps” and even the number of synapses in your own skull!
Yet, still, ai waited.
How many other paths were tried? How about modeling a human brain in software?
Or modeling one in hardware.
Evolve one, in the great Darwinarium experiment!
Or try guiding evolution, altering computers and programs the way we did sheep and dogs, by letting only those reproduce that have traits we like—say, those that pass a Turing test, by seeming human.
Or the ones swarming the streets and homes and virts of Tokyo, selected to exude incredible cuteness?
Others, in a kind of mystical faith that was backed up by mathematics and hothouse physics, figured that a few hundred quantum processors, tuned just right, could connect with their counterparts in an infinite number of parallel worlds, and just-like-that, something marvelous and God-like would pop into being.
The one thing no one expected was for it to happen by accident, arising from a high school science fair experiment.
I mean, wow ain’t it strange that a half-brilliant tweak by sixteen-year-old Marguerita deSilva leaped past the accomplishments of every major laboratory, by uploading into cyberspace a perfect duplicate of the little mind, personality, and instincts of her pet rat, Porfirio?
And wow ain’t it strange that Porfirio proliferated, grabbing resources and expanding, in patterns and spirals that remain—to this day—so deeply and quintessentially ratlike?
Not evil, all-consuming, or even predatory—thank heavens. But insistent.
And Wow, AIST there is a worldwide betting pool, now totaling up to a billion Brazilian reals—over whether Marguerita will end up bankrupt, from all the lawsuits over lost data and computer cycles that have been gobbled up by Porfirio? Or else, if she’ll become the world’s richest person—because so many newer ais are based upon her patents? Or maybe because she alone seems to retain any sort of influence over Porfirio, luring his feral, brilliant attention into virtlayers and corners of the Worldspace where he can do little harm? So far.
And WAIST we are down to this? Propitiating a virtual Rat God—(you see, Porfirio, I remembered to capitalize your name, this time)—so that he’ll be patient and leave us alone. That is, until humans fully succeed where Viktor Frankenstein calamitously failed?
To duplicate the deSilva Result and provide her creation with a mate.
A few ideas distilled down in that excerpt? There are others.
But heck, have you seen that novel’s dramatic and fun 3-minute trailer? All hand-made art from the great Patrick Farley!
And while we’re on the topic: Here I read (aloud of course) chapter two of Existence, consisting of the stand alone story “Aficionado.”
BTW, in EXISTENCE I refer to the US Space Force. Not my biggest prediction, but another hit.
Now... off to the World SciFi Convention...
30 comments:
A virtual rat, fascinating. Possibly safer than a blue jay? Consider an app that can leverage underused neural processors in a few 100K smartphones, possibly one critical breakthrough in knowledge of neural architecture away.
Heh. I remember the rat. I didn't remember the betting pool.
2013 was a rough year for me. Guess I should re-read the book. 8)
I read it in hardcover back in 2012. And I almost never buy fiction in hardcover. My wife and I were both very hungry for new Brin works at the time.
My in-laws celebrated their 50th anniversary that year, and they took the whole family on an Alaska cruise. Space is at a premium when traveling on a cruise ship, and that hardcover book took up a lot of valuable space in my backpack. But there it was anyway.
Cyberpunk isn't dead. In some parts, it is a warning. In some parts, it is the description of a future already coming into effects, or approaching fast.
Let's look at individual elements.
Megacorporations: The usual trope is that Corporations like Tessier-Ashpoole or Arasaka or Omni Consumer Products become states in their own right, with nation-states crumbling or already have been dissolved. In our real-life variant, they have become entwined with government, either through privatization and outsourcing of government responsibilities and power, or through corruption, transforming political representation effectively into shares. Deus Ex also foreshadowed much, the instruments of the War On Terror being used to give power to a shadowy cabal of billionaires in a powerless, fracturing US (and them in the end betraying and killing each other).
Transhumanism: We are already advancing in that regard. We already have the backlash against certain forms, like transsexuality and self-determination in that regard, foreshadowed in Deus Ex Mankind Divided. While Neuralink will be mostly nothing more than a grift, there are a lot of honorable projects underway. The merger of man and machine is in this category, too. Advancement in AI and Robotics will, in a few years, consolidate the power of the haves over the havenots. For a time.
Also, eugenics have been resurrected, which is also in this field.
Environmental Destruction: We don't have to discuss what will happen, and is already underway, or? Plus, in a world that has become sociopathic, you expect that people who plug the cable from the ventilation machines for monetary reasons care for cleaning up air, earth and water?
Film Noir Cynicism: With guys like Harry Lime running the government (or Jarrod Steele, or Bob Page, or Aldon Tyrell), the cynicism aspect is justified. Film Noir, as an atmospheric tool, forces you to walk through muddy waters in a foggy night, and that captures exactly the tone of the current society. The next horror, the next shocking relevation could be just behind the next corner. Also, it often has stark contrasts: Here, the palaces of the wealthy, there the slums of the rest. Here, a sterile corporate environment bereft of any individuality, there, the neon-lit chaos of streets crowded with anyone and anything imaginable.
Babylonic streets. Which are itself are a play on nationalism and xenophobia. Streets full of violence.
High Tech, Low Life. The concept that out of the refuse, defiant people will rise and fight the system on a David-Vs.-Goliath basis (very well used in the character of Adam Smasher, who isn't just a hulking, nearly undefeatable giant of a brute, a true cybernetic ogre, but also the symbol for Arasaka's might), using the tools their oppressors made.
I am quite skeptical of this last part, because, you need people who are willing and able to do that; I don't think that slums produce enough kids who can code or disarm highly sophisticated surveillance systems, and are not cowed by the authoritarian violence neofeudalists are able to exert. (The majority of characters with a protagonist role or created as a player character I have seen once was a player in the system, part of the oppression, and then turns his former employers for a variety of reasons, using what they tought and gave him. Not the kid from the gutter.)
And if a rebellion of slum child soldiers, hardened to death and misery before they turned ten, led by unscrupulous war lords, succeeds? How would that world look like then?
Putin will flatter Two Scoops, of course. But with no credible US witnesses, he will also threaten and control and give marching orders to his puppet.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/08/15/putin-trump-kgb-charm-summit/?
Re: Putin puffing/owning rumpT at summit,
I would use the words, "easy as taking candy from a baby," except that I have tried to take candy from a baby.
Pappenheimer
Even the Fox News reporter is of the same opinion...
Trump waiting for Putin on the airstrip reminded me of the dog greeting me when coming home.*
*Apologies to the dog for making this comparison. Unlike Trump, he's currently stretched out on his cushion, enjoying the Winter sunshine.
A good name for a tv game show:
"No Deal Until There's A Deal"
https://www.threads.com/@stonekettle
The only way Putin could have owned Trump any harder is if he'd shown up wearing a Я с тупым T-shirt
If you don't want to bother with Google Translate, that's "I'm with Stupid."
That said--and please educate me where I'm wrong--aside from Putin scoring some diplomatic points by being greeted by the current occupant of the White House on US soil--I don't see how this meeting was anything other than a big nothingburger. Even if they had agreed to divide up Ukraine, they don't have the power to do so without Ukraine's agreement and Europe's backing. Maybe Trump could have agreed to lift sanctions or allow Russia back into the G7/G8, but that didn't happen either.
To me, this was "Al Capone's Vaults" but even stupider.
https://bsky.app/profile/rudepundit.bsky.social
Trump's repetition of "Russia Russia Russia" is one of the most goddamned embarrassing things any American president has done. It's dumb as shit and infantile.
That said, Trump's "thing" is to insist on using the same dumb phrase to describe the same person/place/thing over and over again. "Crooked Hillary", "Little Marco", etc. Once he gloms onto a phrase like that, he never calls that thing anything else.
"Russia, Russia, Russia," is only a little dumber than the time during his first term where he wanted a budget bill to be named the "Cut, Cut, Cut! Act". This current congress would have done it, too.
For those who don't already know, "Russia, Russia, Russia," has to be a backhanded reference to a famous outburst from The Brady Bunch in which one of the other girls, sick of always being compared to her sister, screams out "Oh, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!"
I was never a Brady Bunch fan, so it was only Trump's use of that phrase that got me thinking about the original. See, there's an episode of the Adam West Batman in which the villainess, played by Carolyn Jones of Adams Family fame, is The Queen of Diamonds. Only they also gave her a human name--unusual for the villains in that series--so she was Marsha, the Queen of Diamonds. And I was sure that the reason they gave her the name Marsha was specifically so that Batman could emote, "Marsha!...Marsha!...Marsha!" while falling under the effects of her chemical hypnosis. And he did actually say that.
A sneaky nod to the Brady Bunch? Had to be, right?
Only I just looked up the timeline. Batman aired between 1966 and 1968. The Brady Bunch didn't start until 1969, and the episode in question ran in 1971. So unless time travel was involved, Batman had the line first.
Some things just have to be true, and yet they aren't.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2025/Items/Aug15-8.html
...
For most of his career, [Judge Learned] Hand was well known to judicial branch and Washington insiders, but not to the general public. That changed on May 21, 1944, during New York City's celebration of "I Am an American Day." He agreed to deliver a brief speech to over 1 million people in Central Park, many of them newly anointed American citizens. Here's the text of the address:
We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedoms from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning. What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.
The address absolutely caught fire—went viral, if we may use modern parlance—and was widely reprinted. It made Hand into a celebrity overnight, and he remained so for the remainder of his life (he died in 1961).
Hand and his audience were, of course, watching events unfold in Europe and Asia. And what he decided is that, for America to be America, we must embrace immigrants. We must be vigilant about leaders who would deprive citizens of their freedom. We must think critically, and be empathetic when it comes to other people. And (in a clear allusion to the Gettysburg address), we must do these things to honor the sacrifices of those who were fighting and dying on the other side of the world. And the million people in his audience that day, and the tens of millions more who read his words in print, thought he was onto something. It's remarkable how relevant his words seem today, 80 years after he first delivered them.
Inspiring.
The repeated reference to men and women is lovely.
Larry,
Does it occur to you that Trump's repetition of "Russia Russia Russia" has worked.
Maybe it IS 'dumb as shit and infantile', but doesn't that characterise his base? The Right-wing media in the US now use the phrase as a shield, to deflect any suggestion of Russian influence over President Trump.
...A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few...
Yep.
Kinda reminds me of something sketched out by our host in his Transparency book. When I want a thing for me but not for someone else, I have to resort to measures that violate liberty. In the book it is all about cameras and the knowledge we gain from them. I want to see what others are planning to do... or admitting they've already done. I don't want others to spy upon me doing the same. Won't work... unless I'm willing to engage in savagery.
The rules by which we live HAVE to be agnostic as to who applies them to whom. That means we have to be willing to check ourselves. Many ARE willing, so the challenge becomes engaging us to check those who are unwilling without creating the monster we'd prefer was never born.
Greetings all from the World Sci Fi Convention in Chicago.
Does it occur to you that Trump's repetition of "Russia Russia Russia" has worked.
Yes, for the same reason that "The Emperor's New Clothes" worked.
I might have bought tickets if I had known.
Timothy Snyder referred to this "liberty in your heart" as "A Habit of Freedom". He said, because he was free in his mind and soul, Zelensky could not desert his place when Russia attacked. Had he done so, he would have proven that he is not free, being chained by fears of the oppressor.
That is the task. Try to find out (isn't that hard) what or whom tyrants want you to fear, don't back but double down. To be ready for it when you get there is the difficult thing.
Speaking of scifi, I predict that the Edith Keeler meme will blossom. It resonates with the right age group (late baby boom).
Yep, Edith Keeler is the exact metaphor for "Democrats must be against gerrymandering, no matter how much Republicans win by using it."
osajh:
...Trump's repetition of "Russia Russia Russia" has worked.
Oger:
Try to find out (isn't that hard) what or whom tyrants want you to fear, don't back but double down.
These two assertions resonate.
DJT's juvenile taunts work because while anyone else in a public position of responsibility would be ashamed to say the ridiculous things that he repeats ad nauseum, he himself has no shame and presents a facade of acceptability. Essentially, he bulls (or bullies) his way through and gives the impression that what he's saying fits into the accepted norms of debate, and gets others to go along through sheer force of personality.
At my old house, there was a neighborhood cat--a pet but he was allowed to roam--who operated in that manner. He acted so confidently as if he belonged in our yard or even inside of our house that our own pet cats just accepted that he must know what he's doing. Von Schitzenpantz* does the same thing when he repeats tropes like "Russia, Russia, Russia" or insists that the 2020 election was "stollen".
There's also an element of "calling a donkey a horse" at work with his supporters--that assertion of facts (election stolen) or terms "Russia, Russia, Russia" is a matter of signaling that you're on Team Trump. The truth or the stupidity or the plausibility of the phrases is completely irrelevant. What's important is that you display the team colors, so to speak.
"The Emperor's New Clothes" wasn't just about the scammers pretending they could see colors and fabrics. It was also their confident assertion that only people of low sophistication would fail to see what they saw--so that no one was inclined to admit seeing no clothing, and in 1984 style, many likely convinced themselves that they saw what everyone else was claiming to see. Only the small child who was too naive to understand the social pressure was free to invoke hard reality as the final arbiter of truth.
Invoking reality instead of groupthink (collective solipsism) is our job now.
As Hal Sparks puts it, "Trump has no shame, but he can be embarrassed."
Gavin Newsom tweeting in Trump's own style makes obvious to even the most obtuse that the style itself is ridiculously absurd. I'm not entirely sure that the pundits who tsk-tsk that Newsom's posts aren't appropriate for a sitting governor are really that naive, or if they're purposely playing to the joke. I hope the latter, but I doubt it.
Forgot about the asterisk.
* I love the fact that autocorrect not only accepts "Von Schitzenpantz" as an actual word, but notifies me when I've "misspelled" it.
The current craze is 'Vibe Coding' where Dunning-Kruger meets GenAI and script kiddies suddenly believe they're Master Programmers. It begs me to talk about FORTH and WJCC, but the room empties whenever I start doing that. So I'll just leave this here:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
- Richard Feynman
That is, his audience can be embarrassed.
I am brainstorming and making up names for sci fi religions for my Spaceport on the Border series and came up with...
Revangicals.
I can't be the first.
Channeling Clarke's '3001: a Final Oddyssey' (yes, he did)... "Hey, GenAI, write a Mandelbrot generation program."
(Hey, it worked on the Monolith!)
Oh, I'm not claiming that GenAI doesn't enable plebes to solve big problems. I'm saying that a sorcerer's apprentice shouldn't guide Humanity. That way lies enshittification.
"It's clever, but is it Art?"
- Rudyard Kipling
Mel Brooks knew the manner in which Putin wants peace:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VM6E4UAJ30
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