7 ms·

Ted Chiang wrote a short story inspired by Flowers for Algernon ("Understand") that explores what might happen if a guy just never stopped getting smarter: http

by blader 4y ago

Ted Chiang wrote a short story inspired by Flowers for Algernon ("Understand") that explores what might happen if a guy just never stopped getting smarter: https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini... I love Flowers for Algernon, but Understand is my favorite short story of all time.

uniqueuid 4y ago
Chiang is great. His collection of short stories - exhalation - is a ton of fun.
mati365 4y ago
Mine too but I was always wondering why haven't the main character mind been used by scientist to improving method used in book?
SamBam 4y ago
I adore most of Chiang's work, but Understand is one of my least favorites. Fun premise, yes, but it reads to me like much less mature sci-fi, like something written by a teen about what being super-smart would feel like.
- darkerside 4y ago
  You probably just didn't get it. Just kidding
  - cwillu 4y ago
    “You're not good at ‹game›, you just do random things for an hour and then you randomly win.” --words I've heard
    - 1123581321 4y ago
      Was this Twilight Imperium? :)
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - cwillu 4y ago
        If I said “no”, would you believe me?
- gwern 4y ago
  That's the problem with any superintelligence story; they are by definition hard to write without being superintelligent. As Vinge was famously told, "you can't write this story. No one can." If a chimpanzee could write a story about a human expert of any sort, the other chimpanzees wouldn't understand it: it would either be gibberish, or dumbed down to superficial analogies that give an illusion of understanding. ("Then he used his rifle -" "what's a rifle?" "it's a stick which is like throwing a rock. Anyway, he traded some bananas for it with another monkey off the Internet." "What's an Internet?" "uh...") 'Flowers' gets around it by starting with a mentally retarded protagonist and specifically trying to avoid any consequences of superintelligence beyond the emotional & social journey, so most of the story is accomplished 'on the runway', as it were, and is about everything but what he learns & does with his intelligence which is pushed into the background. You can see how it starts getting handwavy as soon as the protagonist takes off to smarter than Keys himself, and he starts having to show the progress by him simply doing ordinary-human things but much faster than a dimmer human, like rearranging the bakery for more efficiency or learning Sanskrit in a week. While it's nice to be able to read German or Sanskrit, it's not particularly useful, especially if you are interested in neuroscience; a real protagonist would be doing things Keys can't even imagine, which sound like gibberish like 'ordinary differential equations' or 'symplectic manifold'. Any societal implications are simply ignored. With 'Understand', Chiang starts with an intelligent protagonist, in a strictly realistic universe other than the superintelligence, where he's well aware there would be major societal consequences and military implications and the protagonist can't simply sit around and play with his lab mouse. So his back is against the narrative wall from the start. He cannot do his usual world-building tricks because he's both ruled out the world mechanics he is usually in a privileged position to understand impossibly well because he made them up in the first place, and because he's not smart enough to write the superintelligent character he's assigned himself. It's an interesting story, but I agree that it can't be considered his best. Because he can't write that story as well as he wants to, and no one can.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    "the other chimpanzees wouldn't understand it: it would either be gibberish, or dumbed down" This is kind of how "Excession" by Iain M Banks is. Much of the dialogue in the book is supposed to be between the hyperintelligent AI "Minds" that are the ships in his Culture universe. It's supposed to be in a form similar to how they talk to each other. It's quite hard to read. I can never decide which of the two (gibberish or dumbed down) it is. Probably both.
- notahacker 4y ago
  It would have felt much more plausible with a twist at the end where his "superintelligence" was revealed to be a set of delusions related to his cognitive impairment...
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    People should check out Flowers for Charlie, an episode on the most excellent show It’s Always Sunny.
- bgroat 4y ago
  That's wild because it's my exact opposite take. I found it to be one of the most thoughtful explorations of super-intelligence and how it becomes qualitatively different than conventional intelligence. I came away from it thinking, "This is Limitless if it were written by a grownup"
  - softcactus 4y ago
    Exactly how I felt. It explores what motivations of a super-intelligence might be in a way that I hadn't seen before. I understand the commenter's sentiment though--it's difficult to read an earnest story about a super intelligent trans-human because the archetype of "cool and collected super genius" has been done to death and has become cringeworthy.
    - kragen 4y ago
      The most interesting book I've found on the motivations of a super-genius is Notes on the Collection of Transfers. https://www.sidis.net/TransfersContents.htm https://www.sidis.net/TransfersContents.htm
      - softcactus 4y ago
        I'm not sure I understand. I think I'm missing some context.
        kragen 4y ago
        Look into it. It's fascinating.
        abecedarius 4y ago
        The context is the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis
      - watt 4y ago
        I looked at it and seems this is a collection of inane ramblings about a supremely irrelevant subject: change my mind?
- canes123456 4y ago
  I feel exactly the same way. I believe it was the first story he wrote and it really shows.
nine_k 4y ago
Of Chiang's works, I think “72 Letters“ is the most impressive: it unfolds events and ideas worth a 1000-page novel in like 120 KB of text.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
I agree. IT feels like the continuation of the Flowers story that I wanted in a rereading.
johnchristopher 4y ago
Ted Chiang is among my top three speculative fiction [0] authors. Others are Stefen Baxter and Robert Charles Wilson. [0] at parties, it sounds better than SF
tzs 4y ago
Another interesting story featuring enhanced intelligence is Poul Anderson's novel "Brain Wave". Briefly, there is an energy damping field that projects in a beam from something near the center of our galaxy. One of the effects of this field is to slow down the speed of neural activity. The Sun's orbit around the galaxy takes it through this field periodically. When it enters the field the effect is to make everything with a brain about 1/5th as smart as it was, which usually results in a mass extinction of any species that depended on its brain to survive. That's what did in the dinosaurs for instance which had been near human intelligence before that (the book is from 1954 which is before we figured out what really did them in). Humans evolved while the Earth was in the field, evolving neurons and brain structures that can get to normal human intelligence even with the degrading effects of the field. The start of the novel is set when Earth moves out of the field and so over the next few weeks everything with a brain gets about 5 times smarter than it was before. That has lots of consequences. For example a lot of how we handle animals is based on the animals not being smart. It gets a lot harder to be a pig farmer, say, when your pigs get human genius level intelligence. Of course the farmer is a lot smarter too, but still it will take some time to upgrade the farm to deal with super-genius pigs and the pigs aren't going to just idly wait for that. The novel looks at that and a ton of other changes as Earth adapts and develops to deal with this.

by blader 4y ago

uniqueuid 4y ago

Chiang is great. His collection of short stories - exhalation - is a ton of fun.

mati365 4y ago

Mine too but I was always wondering why haven't the main character mind been used by scientist to improving method used in book?

SamBam 4y ago

I adore most of Chiang's work, but Understand is one of my least favorites. Fun premise, yes, but it reads to me like much less mature sci-fi, like something written by a teen about what being super-smart would feel like.

darkerside 4y ago
You probably just didn't get it. Just kidding
- cwillu 4y ago
  “You're not good at ‹game›, you just do random things for an hour and then you randomly win.” --words I've heard
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    Was this Twilight Imperium? :)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - cwillu 4y ago
      If I said “no”, would you believe me?
gwern 4y ago
That's the problem with any superintelligence story; they are by definition hard to write without being superintelligent. As Vinge was famously told, "you can't write this story. No one can." If a chimpanzee could write a story about a human expert of any sort, the other chimpanzees wouldn't understand it: it would either be gibberish, or dumbed down to superficial analogies that give an illusion of understanding. ("Then he used his rifle -" "what's a rifle?" "it's a stick which is like throwing a rock. Anyway, he traded some bananas for it with another monkey off the Internet." "What's an Internet?" "uh...") 'Flowers' gets around it by starting with a mentally retarded protagonist and specifically trying to avoid any consequences of superintelligence beyond the emotional & social journey, so most of the story is accomplished 'on the runway', as it were, and is about everything but what he learns & does with his intelligence which is pushed into the background. You can see how it starts getting handwavy as soon as the protagonist takes off to smarter than Keys himself, and he starts having to show the progress by him simply doing ordinary-human things but much faster than a dimmer human, like rearranging the bakery for more efficiency or learning Sanskrit in a week. While it's nice to be able to read German or Sanskrit, it's not particularly useful, especially if you are interested in neuroscience; a real protagonist would be doing things Keys can't even imagine, which sound like gibberish like 'ordinary differential equations' or 'symplectic manifold'. Any societal implications are simply ignored. With 'Understand', Chiang starts with an intelligent protagonist, in a strictly realistic universe other than the superintelligence, where he's well aware there would be major societal consequences and military implications and the protagonist can't simply sit around and play with his lab mouse. So his back is against the narrative wall from the start. He cannot do his usual world-building tricks because he's both ruled out the world mechanics he is usually in a privileged position to understand impossibly well because he made them up in the first place, and because he's not smart enough to write the superintelligent character he's assigned himself. It's an interesting story, but I agree that it can't be considered his best. Because he can't write that story as well as he wants to, and no one can.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  "the other chimpanzees wouldn't understand it: it would either be gibberish, or dumbed down" This is kind of how "Excession" by Iain M Banks is. Much of the dialogue in the book is supposed to be between the hyperintelligent AI "Minds" that are the ships in his Culture universe. It's supposed to be in a form similar to how they talk to each other. It's quite hard to read. I can never decide which of the two (gibberish or dumbed down) it is. Probably both.
notahacker 4y ago
It would have felt much more plausible with a twist at the end where his "superintelligence" was revealed to be a set of delusions related to his cognitive impairment...
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  People should check out Flowers for Charlie, an episode on the most excellent show It’s Always Sunny.
bgroat 4y ago
That's wild because it's my exact opposite take. I found it to be one of the most thoughtful explorations of super-intelligence and how it becomes qualitatively different than conventional intelligence. I came away from it thinking, "This is Limitless if it were written by a grownup"
- softcactus 4y ago
  Exactly how I felt. It explores what motivations of a super-intelligence might be in a way that I hadn't seen before. I understand the commenter's sentiment though--it's difficult to read an earnest story about a super intelligent trans-human because the archetype of "cool and collected super genius" has been done to death and has become cringeworthy.
  - kragen 4y ago
    The most interesting book I've found on the motivations of a super-genius is Notes on the Collection of Transfers. https://www.sidis.net/TransfersContents.htm https://www.sidis.net/TransfersContents.htm
    - softcactus 4y ago
      I'm not sure I understand. I think I'm missing some context.
      - kragen 4y ago
        Look into it. It's fascinating.
      - abecedarius 4y ago
        The context is the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis
    - watt 4y ago
      I looked at it and seems this is a collection of inane ramblings about a supremely irrelevant subject: change my mind?
canes123456 4y ago
I feel exactly the same way. I believe it was the first story he wrote and it really shows.

nine_k 4y ago

Of Chiang's works, I think “72 Letters“ is the most impressive: it unfolds events and ideas worth a 1000-page novel in like 120 KB of text.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

I agree. IT feels like the continuation of the Flowers story that I wanted in a rereading.

johnchristopher 4y ago

Ted Chiang is among my top three speculative fiction [0] authors. Others are Stefen Baxter and Robert Charles Wilson. [0] at parties, it sounds better than SF

tzs 4y ago

Another interesting story featuring enhanced intelligence is Poul Anderson's novel "Brain Wave". Briefly, there is an energy damping field that projects in a beam from something near the center of our galaxy. One of the effects of this field is to slow down the speed of neural activity. The Sun's orbit around the galaxy takes it through this field periodically. When it enters the field the effect is to make everything with a brain about 1/5th as smart as it was, which usually results in a mass extinction of any species that depended on its brain to survive. That's what did in the dinosaurs for instance which had been near human intelligence before that (the book is from 1954 which is before we figured out what really did them in). Humans evolved while the Earth was in the field, evolving neurons and brain structures that can get to normal human intelligence even with the degrading effects of the field. The start of the novel is set when Earth moves out of the field and so over the next few weeks everything with a brain gets about 5 times smarter than it was before. That has lots of consequences. For example a lot of how we handle animals is based on the animals not being smart. It gets a lot harder to be a pig farmer, say, when your pigs get human genius level intelligence. Of course the farmer is a lot smarter too, but still it will take some time to upgrade the farm to deal with super-genius pigs and the pigs aren't going to just idly wait for that. The novel looks at that and a ton of other changes as Earth adapts and develops to deal with this.