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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm picking up Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist. It has been on the backlog for a while as an influential book, but a careless thought has finally given me a reason to be interested: I wonder what impact wokeness has had on highly successful minorities.
Paper I'm reading: Thiele's Things Fall Apart: Integrity and Visibility in Democratic Liberal Education.
Time to Orbit: Unknown, a recommendation from /r/rational I've been enjoying.
It's set in a colony ship to a distant system where the protagonist gets woken up early in the middle of things going to shit and has to grapple to fix them. It's really well written with good characters and interesting worldbuilding, except for one part that makes me pull my hair out:
It always severely exasperates me when scifi stories written as late as 2022 depict AI as being dumber than GPT-4 (or GPT-3, going by what was SOTA at the time of writing).
Or the utter lack of robotics, so far. Seriously, a few remote manipulators and some things barely more advanced than the products of modern Boston Dynamics would be nice to see!
And the technology seems quaint given how far in the future it's set. You'd think they'd have full immersion VR or something like that.
I can forgive this in a novel written before, say, 2015, but when the characters bloviate about how AI can never replicate human intelligence and apparently neural networks can't do the work of a brain, I'm going to piss and cry and shit myself in frustration.
Seriously, I'm reading chapters written in Feb 2023 and the issue persists, it takes my suspension of disbelief and hangs it by the neck till it's dead.
Oh, apparently the AI isn't good enough to reliably identify things from video footage, when that was a thing 2 years ago. Ah, it can't do more than basic logic, and is apparently incapable of lying because it's too dumb. Fuck me sideways. It's 2023, even the Somalians have likely heard about ChatGPT.
Of course, I'm unusually sensitive to authors being pussies about advancing technology in their nominally scifi novels, which is why I wrote one myself and threw everything and the kitchen sink into it. Nobody can say I don't put my money where my mouth is in that regard!
Ahem, diatribe out of the way, it's a good story, I'd rate it a 9/10 if not for this point which forces me to penalize it to an 8/10. I know, I know, I'm sorry for being so harsh.
My favorite series of novels set in a sort-of colony ship still remains the Sunflower series by Peter Watts, where the AI in charge is intentionally made dumber than it could be so it can't diverge from its directives over literal millions of years and needs to rely on its human crew as form of checks and balance.
Of course I'm still reading Reverend Insanity, at chapter 1186. Yes, four digit chapter numbers are run of the mill in the genre. At this rate I'm still going to be reading it till the sun swells up and boils the oceans.
No sci fi really captures the possibilities inherent in generative AI because they’re so significant. Even far-out stuff like Culture or Revelation Space doesn’t really.
The problem is that there’s limited room for human protagonists’ agency when AI (or AI + decent robots which all science fiction generally assumes) and this is kind of the core of storytelling. It’s the same reason why sci fi struggles to move away from human pilots and captains and soldiers and so on. I think moving forward a lot of science fiction will be retro-future stuff that imagines we went to space with something like 1960s to 1990s technology and that AI wasn’t invented, or at least not in the way it was here. Starfield seems to be taking this approach.
I'm so, so tired of stories that follow human narrative sensibilities. Are there any books that ask the reader to fall in love with a well crafted structure that completely defies human narrative convention? That aims to map the reader to the alien rather than mapping the alien to the reader?
Stenislaw Lem's Solaris might be worth a read if you haven't already. It doesn't play with a narrative convention at all though, but conveys a sense of something truly alien.
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