12 ms·

One problem in written science fiction is the requirement for it to be at least vaguely commercially viable, which necessitates dramatic plotting and/or readabi

One problem in written science fiction is the requirement for it to be at least vaguely commercially viable, which necessitates dramatic plotting and/or readability. ML is, to most non-technical people, intensely boring. How do you dramatize it? I've published two novels that go there: 2011's "Rule 34", and -- coming out this September -- "Invisible Sun", and in both books ML is very much a subaltern aspect of the narrative. That is, neither book would have a plot without the presence of ML, but it's not really possible in my opinion to write a novel about ML in the same way that the earlier brain-in-a-box model of AI could form the key conceit of books like "2001: A Space Odyssey", "The Adolescence of P-1", or "Colossus" (examples from the 1960s and 1970s when it was still a fresh, new trope rather than being pounded into the dirt). So it probably shouldn't surprise anyone much that SF hasn't said much about the field so far, any more than it had much to say about personal computers before 1980 or about the internet before 1990 -- what examples there are were notable exceptions, recognized after the event.

lostdog 6y ago
Scifi authors have definitely been writing about smart computers for a while now. Maybe some of the things that are newly specific to ML can be fodder for writing: - When building an ML model, you think much less about the structure of the model and much more about getting a variety of data to feed it. One could imagine some really silly situations. If you're training an affect-recognition model, you might want to contract every single actor in hollywood to act out a single scene. Maybe your voice recognition model is not working on certain people, so you hunt down a specific person and force them to read all of Shakespeare's work out loud. You might work on self-driving problems, and every day you instruct a full village of people to enact a precise ballet of driving, walking, and roadwork, to get the autonomous brain to learn some weird corner case of reasoning. Similar to Player Piano, so many people will be working on non-directly-productive work, almost play-acting work so a computer can do it for real. - Sometimes ML doesn't work in really weird specific situations. In the 90s, your program could stop working because the lighting and shadows changed, but now the reasons for something failing are so much more obscure. What is it like becoming an expert in psychology for something that doesn't even really think? What does that person do day-to-day and what does their boss think of them? Is it more like being an independent psychiatrist, or more like a police detective? (then again, I'm drifting into an Asimov plot even as I write this...) - Each object you train an ML model on takes a certain amount of investment, in data collection, in debugging, and in adjusting the training process. Each object adds expense, so maybe a solution is to stop adding objects? Maybe your Alexa enhanced home edition was built in 2025, so to keep your house in order you can't buy items made from 2026 onwards. Or maybe it's a big societal issue, so the government mandates that every new item created must pay some kind of registration fee. Maybe it only allows 10 new items per year. Some people would be pretty unhappy about that. Maybe you're right! Maybe switching from straight edges screws to philips screws makes for a really boring story, because we've already written every story that accounts for some kind of screw driver.
ilaksh 6y ago
Great point. However, I assume that you are aware but ML really is moving towards more general purpose AI. For example, the Turing Award winners for Deep Learning (Hinton/LeCun/Bengio) have all listed the numerous shortcomings of today's narrow AI and public declared an earnest interest in more human-like capabilities. And started serious research programs attacking those shortcomings. With many of the current generation of researchers quite engaged with them. There is progress on self-supervised learning, transfer learning, multimodal learning, more powerful models such as the transformer, extracting more accurate and fundamental latent spaces, model-based, online learning, more modular systems, 3d reconstruction from images and even videos, J. Tenenbaum's clear functional explanation beginning to be addressed with the new neural network tools, etc. Most of the results are not at the present moment inspiring enough to base a novel around. But there are many promising threads.
alecco 6y ago
Greg Egan opened up the path with Sci-Fi novels based on hard physics. They have a select audience but they are a treasure.
EGreg 6y ago
Literally every movie or book that depicts AI in 100-200 years would be super boring. Imagine star trek where instead of Data being one android, you just had a ton of machines that could do everything better than humans. No point for the humans to explore space or do anything. The end. Imagine in Minority Report where Tom Cruise is instantly caught because his whereabouts can easily be tracked and triangulated, by his gait, infrared heart signature, smell, and a number of other things. Movie takes 2 minutes. The end. In fact, this is the world we are building for ourselves. We're going to be like animals in a zoo, unable to affect nothing. Just like a cat has no idea why you're doing 99% of the things you do, but has to go along with it, similarly you will have no idea why the robot networks do 99% of their activities, you just kinda live your life with as much understanding as a cat has in your house, as you go about your daily business. The closest I can think of is Isaac Asimov's "I Robot" maybe. And even there, the robots weren't in charge really.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Asimov wrote about that with his "zeroth" law of robotics.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > Imagine in Minority Report where Tom Cruise is instantly caught because his whereabouts can easily be tracked and triangulated, by his gait, infrared heart signature, smell, and a number of other things. Movie takes 2 minutes. The end. Agh, I can't find it now, but there's a short film half based on this: A time traveler from the future is identified instantly because she's in two places at once. The short has both of them in adjacent interrogation rooms, with two onlookers - a rookie and an experienced investigator - talking about how to identify time travelers. It ends with the experienced one commenting that they've been showing up more and more often. Minority Report might not be possible with such technology, but it does open different possibilities.
  - Malic 6y ago
    Do share the name of the short, if it comes to mind later.
bfdm 6y ago
I tend to agree that ML will not itself be the subject, but rather a device or tool misused by Someone Bad. As you say, it's a necessary and integral piece of the story, but not the star. For example, it brings to mind some combination of Minority Report and Eagle Eye, say. Where a surveillance state combined with ML analysis leads to something akin to pre-crime arrests and the fight back against that.
- dllthomas 6y ago
  If you haven't read Minority Report, I recommend it.
- akovaski 6y ago
  > Where a surveillance state combined with ML analysis leads to something akin to pre-crime arrests While I haven't seen Minority Report or Eagle Eye, this aptly describes the anime TV series Psycho-Pass (2012). If I remember correctly, the show is mostly focused on the effects of having a crime-coefficient system.
- Izkata 6y ago
  > I tend to agree that ML will not itself be the subject, but rather a device or tool misused by Someone Bad. I got a counterexample: Person of Interest [0] was a crime series from 2011-2016 premised around machine learning. The opening narration from each episode of the first season[1]: You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because, I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people. People like you. Crimes the government considered "irrelevant". They wouldn't act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You will never find us. But victim or perpetrator, if your number's up, we'll find you. Revealed in flashbacks over the first season, the government doesn't have access to the system. It runs independently (even from its creator) and just provides information. Being TV it does of course expand past the original premise, with a reveal that it's not just a machine learning system but the world's first true AI, and later another AI with conflicting goals is brought online. But for the first season at least, the machine sticks to the role described in the narration, and appears to be just a machine learning system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBfVndEtDyY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBfVndEtDyY
gradys 6y ago
How do I make sure I hear about Invisible Sun when it comes out?
- ideonode 6y ago
  It's Charles Stross, one of the leading SF writers of the day.
  - cstross 6y ago
    ... It's also the ninth (and final) book in a long-running series, so not the greatest starting point!
    - klyrs 6y ago
      Hah, Robert Jordan taught me to watch for the phrase "[n]th (and final)". No, I won't start on that book, but I'll definitely pick up a copy of the first :)
      - cstross 6y ago
        Hint: I remastered the original six book series in three revised omnibus editions circa 2011. (There's then a subsequent trilogy, of which "Invisible Sun" is the climax.) Anyway, start with "The Bloodline Feud" rather than the slim original marketed-as-fantasy six-pack. I learned a lot in the decade between writing the first books and re-doing them, and the omnibus versions read more cleanly.
        klyrs 6y ago
        Awesome, thanks!
Geminidog 6y ago
It’s even boring to technical people. It reduces intelligence to a multidimensional optimization problem. Now intelligence just involves all kinds of mechanical ways to fill out the weights for a neural network. I use to be more interested. Upon learning more about it, I am less motivated.
- mmcnl 6y ago
  Technical is quite a broad term. There are quite some challenges in designing and engineering large ML data pipelines, both from a technical and business perspective. But I agree it's a specific problem that is arguably boring to a lot of people. Some people take more fun in the modelling part, others more in the engineering. Personally, I'm more into the engineering part than creating the actual model.
- Schiphol 6y ago
  > It reduces intelligence to a multidimensional optimization problem. Did you mean to say "... which it is not", or "which it is, thus the boringness"?
  - Geminidog 6y ago
    Let me clarify. I mean “intelligence from the perspective of modern ML” is just an optimization problem.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  I've found exactly the same experience. Data science is mostly cleaning data in the first place, and the 10% that isn't, it's just fiddling knobs (hyperparameter optimization) to get the model to work. But man, I can't argue the incredible results it creates. Perhaps that's why people do it, for the ends not the means.
  - octodog 6y ago
    I work in a data science team and I think that motivates a lot of my colleagues. Delivering a product and looking at the massive impact it has on the business is very satisfying.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Balgair 6y ago
Hey Mr. Stross, I'm a big fan of your work! Thanks for hanging out here on HN with us. I thought Accelerando was superb. Keep up the hard work of writing! I know it can be tough, but your efforts have really paid off, at least to me. One question, if you're up for doing any questions: what do you think about the use of drones and loitering munitions in the recent Azerbaijani-Armenian War of 2020? Thanks again for all the hard work! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_conflict
indymike 6y ago
"ML is, to most non-technical people, intensely boring." Maybe, or maybe it's just an old trope as you point out. So much of science fiction assumes some level of intelligent computers and has since the beginning. The phrase "machine learning" is really a rebrand of the "thinking machines" of the 60s and artifical intelligence" of the 70s and 80s. Even in the old Star Trek TV series, you had people talking to the computer, not unlike we talk to Alexa, Siri and Hey Google today. That said, now that people are seeing ML affect their lives directly, there is a lot of exploration that may be possible, as perhaps, ML is just not science fiction anymore.
- notahacker 6y ago
  I think the point is we gained the scifi UX, and lost most of the interesting plot devices. We got the talking computer without enough self awareness or reliability or uniqueness compared with other forms of data interrogation to be a particularly interesting plot point. Alexa and Siri and Google Home aren't going to take over the world or try to become human, and aren't infallible or even particularly smart. They're a speech input interfaces over a search engine with some jokes hardcoded in. From a technical standpoint, very impressive; from a fiction standpoint a dead end
jayd16 6y ago
I feel like the Running Man is a good example of machine learning in sci-fi. It dug into deep fakes and how they could be used to create a massive propaganda machine. I wouldn't call that boring.
justin66 6y ago
It’s a bit of a tangent, but I got a kick out of hearing Paul Krugman make a glowing endorsement of your work last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-paul-krugman-transcript.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...
drdeadringer 6y ago
> ML is, to most non-technical people, intensely boring. How do you dramatize it? To me it's akin to several scenes in the film "War Games" where you basically have to make a rogue AI in a computer sexy on film. "Show a computer thinking. Make it scary. Inhuman. Enhance that it's impersonal." So we get a camera person slowly walking around an obelisk-like table with ominous music. "This is where the AI lives, thinking on how to rain nuclear fire upon the vile Soviets, no humans need interfere, enhance and intensify, will Tic-Tac-Toe save us from our folly". And around and around the evil obelisk table we go watching bits flip up and down back and forth with nuclear missiles in question. You can find similar elsewhere. Dramatic flashing lights on a server rack, a human taken over by external forces blindly jabbing at a keyboard or keypad with intense purpose. All of a sudden from these wonders computational magic happens.
DiggyJohnson 6y ago
Do you frequent any forums or sites recommend for the serious amateur interested in the production of the sci-fi? I especially appreciate this discussion. It’s fun to think about the gaps in our imagination. Especially when it comes to science fiction, those gaps are often wider than we think. Good luck with your work! I’ll be on the lookout for Invisible Sun, unless you recommend a different title. Besides ML, do you have any other fururist predictions that are not being realized in science fiction?
m463 6y ago
That touches on a point about science fiction I've noticed. reality can be boring. Reality dictates that we travel at a fraction of the speed of light. We cannot fix things we did. We have a limited lifespan. Honestly the made-up stuff makes fiction a lot more entertaining. Time travel is really fun (though primer required a dive into wikipedia to unravel). Warp drives and wormholes open the universe to exploration. Living forever might be just as fun as time travel - you can fix stuff forward or just see it all. I don't mind suspending my disbelief. EDIT: On the other hand, there might be one real subject that is interesting from https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/ https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/ it had a quote: Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make. This is biology. - Bert Hubert, "Our Amazing Immune System"
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  I have long and continuous string of 'jokes' that are about a future where common technological items have been replaced by some sort of genetically engineered plant, animal or fungus.
- perilunar 6y ago
  I'm the opposite: I find FTL, warp drives, and wormholes a bit tedious in SF. They've been done to death, and all they do is make exploring boring by reducing the immensity of the universe to nothing. Time travel is fun, but only for the jokes and paradoxes. Realistic SF is more entertaining IMO. e.g. I much prefer The Expanse or The Martian to Star Trek or Star Wars.
superkuh 6y ago
Robert Charles Wilson's "Blind Lake" (2004) is a scifi book about a (then) very near future when the data from telescopes would be almost as much hallucinated from big data models as composed of actual data from measurements. It's plot goes a little more quantum handwavy than direct machine learning but the gist is the same.

lostdog 6y ago

Scifi authors have definitely been writing about smart computers for a while now. Maybe some of the things that are newly specific to ML can be fodder for writing: - When building an ML model, you think much less about the structure of the model and much more about getting a variety of data to feed it. One could imagine some really silly situations. If you're training an affect-recognition model, you might want to contract every single actor in hollywood to act out a single scene. Maybe your voice recognition model is not working on certain people, so you hunt down a specific person and force them to read all of Shakespeare's work out loud. You might work on self-driving problems, and every day you instruct a full village of people to enact a precise ballet of driving, walking, and roadwork, to get the autonomous brain to learn some weird corner case of reasoning. Similar to Player Piano, so many people will be working on non-directly-productive work, almost play-acting work so a computer can do it for real. - Sometimes ML doesn't work in really weird specific situations. In the 90s, your program could stop working because the lighting and shadows changed, but now the reasons for something failing are so much more obscure. What is it like becoming an expert in psychology for something that doesn't even really think? What does that person do day-to-day and what does their boss think of them? Is it more like being an independent psychiatrist, or more like a police detective? (then again, I'm drifting into an Asimov plot even as I write this...) - Each object you train an ML model on takes a certain amount of investment, in data collection, in debugging, and in adjusting the training process. Each object adds expense, so maybe a solution is to stop adding objects? Maybe your Alexa enhanced home edition was built in 2025, so to keep your house in order you can't buy items made from 2026 onwards. Or maybe it's a big societal issue, so the government mandates that every new item created must pay some kind of registration fee. Maybe it only allows 10 new items per year. Some people would be pretty unhappy about that. Maybe you're right! Maybe switching from straight edges screws to philips screws makes for a really boring story, because we've already written every story that accounts for some kind of screw driver.

ilaksh 6y ago

Great point. However, I assume that you are aware but ML really is moving towards more general purpose AI. For example, the Turing Award winners for Deep Learning (Hinton/LeCun/Bengio) have all listed the numerous shortcomings of today's narrow AI and public declared an earnest interest in more human-like capabilities. And started serious research programs attacking those shortcomings. With many of the current generation of researchers quite engaged with them. There is progress on self-supervised learning, transfer learning, multimodal learning, more powerful models such as the transformer, extracting more accurate and fundamental latent spaces, model-based, online learning, more modular systems, 3d reconstruction from images and even videos, J. Tenenbaum's clear functional explanation beginning to be addressed with the new neural network tools, etc. Most of the results are not at the present moment inspiring enough to base a novel around. But there are many promising threads.

alecco 6y ago

Greg Egan opened up the path with Sci-Fi novels based on hard physics. They have a select audience but they are a treasure.

EGreg 6y ago

Literally every movie or book that depicts AI in 100-200 years would be super boring. Imagine star trek where instead of Data being one android, you just had a ton of machines that could do everything better than humans. No point for the humans to explore space or do anything. The end. Imagine in Minority Report where Tom Cruise is instantly caught because his whereabouts can easily be tracked and triangulated, by his gait, infrared heart signature, smell, and a number of other things. Movie takes 2 minutes. The end. In fact, this is the world we are building for ourselves. We're going to be like animals in a zoo, unable to affect nothing. Just like a cat has no idea why you're doing 99% of the things you do, but has to go along with it, similarly you will have no idea why the robot networks do 99% of their activities, you just kinda live your life with as much understanding as a cat has in your house, as you go about your daily business. The closest I can think of is Isaac Asimov's "I Robot" maybe. And even there, the robots weren't in charge really.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Asimov wrote about that with his "zeroth" law of robotics.
Izkata 6y ago
> Imagine in Minority Report where Tom Cruise is instantly caught because his whereabouts can easily be tracked and triangulated, by his gait, infrared heart signature, smell, and a number of other things. Movie takes 2 minutes. The end. Agh, I can't find it now, but there's a short film half based on this: A time traveler from the future is identified instantly because she's in two places at once. The short has both of them in adjacent interrogation rooms, with two onlookers - a rookie and an experienced investigator - talking about how to identify time travelers. It ends with the experienced one commenting that they've been showing up more and more often. Minority Report might not be possible with such technology, but it does open different possibilities.
- Malic 6y ago
  Do share the name of the short, if it comes to mind later.

bfdm 6y ago

I tend to agree that ML will not itself be the subject, but rather a device or tool misused by Someone Bad. As you say, it's a necessary and integral piece of the story, but not the star. For example, it brings to mind some combination of Minority Report and Eagle Eye, say. Where a surveillance state combined with ML analysis leads to something akin to pre-crime arrests and the fight back against that.

dllthomas 6y ago
If you haven't read Minority Report, I recommend it.
akovaski 6y ago
> Where a surveillance state combined with ML analysis leads to something akin to pre-crime arrests While I haven't seen Minority Report or Eagle Eye, this aptly describes the anime TV series Psycho-Pass (2012). If I remember correctly, the show is mostly focused on the effects of having a crime-coefficient system.
Izkata 6y ago
> I tend to agree that ML will not itself be the subject, but rather a device or tool misused by Someone Bad. I got a counterexample: Person of Interest [0] was a crime series from 2011-2016 premised around machine learning. The opening narration from each episode of the first season[1]: You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because, I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people. People like you. Crimes the government considered "irrelevant". They wouldn't act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You will never find us. But victim or perpetrator, if your number's up, we'll find you. Revealed in flashbacks over the first season, the government doesn't have access to the system. It runs independently (even from its creator) and just provides information. Being TV it does of course expand past the original premise, with a reveal that it's not just a machine learning system but the world's first true AI, and later another AI with conflicting goals is brought online. But for the first season at least, the machine sticks to the role described in the narration, and appears to be just a machine learning system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBfVndEtDyY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBfVndEtDyY

gradys 6y ago

How do I make sure I hear about Invisible Sun when it comes out?

ideonode 6y ago
It's Charles Stross, one of the leading SF writers of the day.
- cstross 6y ago
  ... It's also the ninth (and final) book in a long-running series, so not the greatest starting point!
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Hah, Robert Jordan taught me to watch for the phrase "[n]th (and final)". No, I won't start on that book, but I'll definitely pick up a copy of the first :)
    - cstross 6y ago
      Hint: I remastered the original six book series in three revised omnibus editions circa 2011. (There's then a subsequent trilogy, of which "Invisible Sun" is the climax.) Anyway, start with "The Bloodline Feud" rather than the slim original marketed-as-fantasy six-pack. I learned a lot in the decade between writing the first books and re-doing them, and the omnibus versions read more cleanly.
      - klyrs 6y ago
        Awesome, thanks!

Geminidog 6y ago

It’s even boring to technical people. It reduces intelligence to a multidimensional optimization problem. Now intelligence just involves all kinds of mechanical ways to fill out the weights for a neural network. I use to be more interested. Upon learning more about it, I am less motivated.

mmcnl 6y ago
Technical is quite a broad term. There are quite some challenges in designing and engineering large ML data pipelines, both from a technical and business perspective. But I agree it's a specific problem that is arguably boring to a lot of people. Some people take more fun in the modelling part, others more in the engineering. Personally, I'm more into the engineering part than creating the actual model.
Schiphol 6y ago
> It reduces intelligence to a multidimensional optimization problem. Did you mean to say "... which it is not", or "which it is, thus the boringness"?
- Geminidog 6y ago
  Let me clarify. I mean “intelligence from the perspective of modern ML” is just an optimization problem.
cercatrova 6y ago
I've found exactly the same experience. Data science is mostly cleaning data in the first place, and the 10% that isn't, it's just fiddling knobs (hyperparameter optimization) to get the model to work. But man, I can't argue the incredible results it creates. Perhaps that's why people do it, for the ends not the means.
- octodog 6y ago
  I work in a data science team and I think that motivates a lot of my colleagues. Delivering a product and looking at the massive impact it has on the business is very satisfying.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Balgair 6y ago

Hey Mr. Stross, I'm a big fan of your work! Thanks for hanging out here on HN with us. I thought Accelerando was superb. Keep up the hard work of writing! I know it can be tough, but your efforts have really paid off, at least to me. One question, if you're up for doing any questions: what do you think about the use of drones and loitering munitions in the recent Azerbaijani-Armenian War of 2020? Thanks again for all the hard work! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_conflict

indymike 6y ago

"ML is, to most non-technical people, intensely boring." Maybe, or maybe it's just an old trope as you point out. So much of science fiction assumes some level of intelligent computers and has since the beginning. The phrase "machine learning" is really a rebrand of the "thinking machines" of the 60s and artifical intelligence" of the 70s and 80s. Even in the old Star Trek TV series, you had people talking to the computer, not unlike we talk to Alexa, Siri and Hey Google today. That said, now that people are seeing ML affect their lives directly, there is a lot of exploration that may be possible, as perhaps, ML is just not science fiction anymore.

notahacker 6y ago
I think the point is we gained the scifi UX, and lost most of the interesting plot devices. We got the talking computer without enough self awareness or reliability or uniqueness compared with other forms of data interrogation to be a particularly interesting plot point. Alexa and Siri and Google Home aren't going to take over the world or try to become human, and aren't infallible or even particularly smart. They're a speech input interfaces over a search engine with some jokes hardcoded in. From a technical standpoint, very impressive; from a fiction standpoint a dead end

jayd16 6y ago

I feel like the Running Man is a good example of machine learning in sci-fi. It dug into deep fakes and how they could be used to create a massive propaganda machine. I wouldn't call that boring.

justin66 6y ago

It’s a bit of a tangent, but I got a kick out of hearing Paul Krugman make a glowing endorsement of your work last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-paul-krugman-transcript.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...

drdeadringer 6y ago

> ML is, to most non-technical people, intensely boring. How do you dramatize it? To me it's akin to several scenes in the film "War Games" where you basically have to make a rogue AI in a computer sexy on film. "Show a computer thinking. Make it scary. Inhuman. Enhance that it's impersonal." So we get a camera person slowly walking around an obelisk-like table with ominous music. "This is where the AI lives, thinking on how to rain nuclear fire upon the vile Soviets, no humans need interfere, enhance and intensify, will Tic-Tac-Toe save us from our folly". And around and around the evil obelisk table we go watching bits flip up and down back and forth with nuclear missiles in question. You can find similar elsewhere. Dramatic flashing lights on a server rack, a human taken over by external forces blindly jabbing at a keyboard or keypad with intense purpose. All of a sudden from these wonders computational magic happens.

DiggyJohnson 6y ago

Do you frequent any forums or sites recommend for the serious amateur interested in the production of the sci-fi? I especially appreciate this discussion. It’s fun to think about the gaps in our imagination. Especially when it comes to science fiction, those gaps are often wider than we think. Good luck with your work! I’ll be on the lookout for Invisible Sun, unless you recommend a different title. Besides ML, do you have any other fururist predictions that are not being realized in science fiction?

m463 6y ago

That touches on a point about science fiction I've noticed. reality can be boring. Reality dictates that we travel at a fraction of the speed of light. We cannot fix things we did. We have a limited lifespan. Honestly the made-up stuff makes fiction a lot more entertaining. Time travel is really fun (though primer required a dive into wikipedia to unravel). Warp drives and wormholes open the universe to exploration. Living forever might be just as fun as time travel - you can fix stuff forward or just see it all. I don't mind suspending my disbelief. EDIT: On the other hand, there might be one real subject that is interesting from https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/ https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/ it had a quote: Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make. This is biology. - Bert Hubert, "Our Amazing Immune System"

Gibbon1 6y ago
I have long and continuous string of 'jokes' that are about a future where common technological items have been replaced by some sort of genetically engineered plant, animal or fungus.
perilunar 6y ago
I'm the opposite: I find FTL, warp drives, and wormholes a bit tedious in SF. They've been done to death, and all they do is make exploring boring by reducing the immensity of the universe to nothing. Time travel is fun, but only for the jokes and paradoxes. Realistic SF is more entertaining IMO. e.g. I much prefer The Expanse or The Martian to Star Trek or Star Wars.

superkuh 6y ago

Robert Charles Wilson's "Blind Lake" (2004) is a scifi book about a (then) very near future when the data from telescopes would be almost as much hallucinated from big data models as composed of actual data from measurements. It's plot goes a little more quantum handwavy than direct machine learning but the gist is the same.