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This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what t

This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting a global belief in the community isomorphic to the alteration. You haven't altered the culture. You'd just asserted a group of unthinking zombies. So when I read: > Imagine a world where computers are inherently old. Whatever you do with them is automatically seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition. Even though new discoveries do happen, they cannot dispel the aura of oldness. I can't conceive of such a world. Its incoherent. I also can't imagine a world where no one likes metals for whatever reason. You can't just assert a fact like that and press play. It's nonsensical.

tobr 4y ago
Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that someone would write a piece where computers were inherently old.
- andai 4y ago
  Expert prompt crafting!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - shagie 4y ago
    A sci-fi magazine has cut off submissions after a flood of AI-generated stories - https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt... > The science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld has been forced to stop accepting any new submissions from writers after it was bombarded with what it says were AI-generated stories. > The magazine officially shut off submissions on February 20 after a surge in stories that publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke says were clearly machine-written.
  - code_duck 4y ago
    I got some pretty interesting sci-fi type results for that in Stable Diffusion. It helped to negative-prompt titles, text, words, etc
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    I'm so mad you made this comment before me.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  This breaks immersion for a lot of people, me included. It's one of the biggest issues I have with lots of sci-fi (moreso than most other types of speculative fiction) novels. Just asserting a fact this fundamental and building your world around it only works if societies, culture, technologies, and history are build around it. Humanity's history with tools and automation are millenia old. To alter this would require a lot of changes. We've been automating, forgetting, copying, and maintaining technologies for as long as our history. Alien technology encounter stories satisfy some of this for me, as the injection of a foreign, advanced technology makes sense in this framework, much like how ancient peoples would discover technologies built by neighbors or rivals they didn't communicate regularly with.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    To some degree I agree with your last point. Before the idea of aliens, writers like Plato and Thomas Moore would posit some undiscovered island where they could imagine a culture unlike their own existing, which like with aliens, gave plausibility as to why that culture would have a different history and traditions than their own. Of course they, like many speculative writers today, were really writing about how they wished their own society worked.
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    Hmmm. Good observations. I hope this doesn't break my interest in the Warhammer universe, lol, which I believe probably suffer from a lacking "origin story"
- Jiro 4y ago
  It's like asking "would you believe in homeopathy if doctors all told you that it was correct?" To which the answer is "Doctors believe things for reasons. You can't just flip a switch and change what doctors think without changing the entire world so that homeopathy is actually true, and that would be such a weird world that science in it would be unrecognizeable." (And since I'm not ChatGPT, I can answer your entire question: "Such a story would have an incoherent world. I could imagine someone writing a story that takes place in an incoherent world, but you wouldn't be able to get useful insights from it.")
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Step 1: for some reason, the world stops making computers, but keeps the ones that already exist Step 2: 100 years pass Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines. Was that so hard?
- curtisblaine 4y ago
  Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply not believable: a society that has machines that could, at the minimum, help solving complex calculations and engineering problems much better than humans decides to completely ignore them. That's not how societies work.
  - curtisblaine 4y ago
    Unless they have other means of solving those calculations better than computers; in that case, call those other means "computers" and the study of older computers "retro-computing".
    - em-bee 4y ago
      something like the amish, relying on 100 year old technology developed by humans instead of those newfangled tools that aliens brought that no human can understand.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    1 is easy to imagine - a large enough collapse that making new ones is very very hard, especially compared to scrounging and repurposing the huge amount of existing ones. Imagine a huge population decline, and search parties looking through the ruins for useful tech, like computers, decades later. Such a society could probably make new computers, but the cost of making new, much worse specced computers, may not be cost effective for a long time as long as old computers can be found and repaired. Edit: such a movie or novel would make for great Fallout-ish world-building. Imagine for instance a large hotel in a big city running the booking system on an old laptop in a central secure location, and new 8-bit computers used as terminals at the front desk. Public access 8-bit computer terminals at public libraries connected to copies of WikiPedia running on some old gaming rig and such things. :-)
vanderZwan 4y ago
You're basically missing the whole point of speculative fiction in this style, which is "we start with imagining a world which has these conclusions. Trying to imagine it forces us to try to make sense of what could lead to those conclusions." You assert it's incoherent. That's part of the point: it's incoherent with your current understanding of our current world. There might be other circumstances that lead to a such world without being incoherent. If the conclusions in a piece of speculative fiction are appealing, it may be worth thinking of what it takes to reach those conclusions. The thought exercise of trying to make it coherent is part of the point.
- gweinberg 4y ago
  No, the point is it can't be done. It's like cleaning your house with an 100 year old tortoise: you absolutely would do that, if tortoises were plentiful and do a good job cleaning. Why would anyone clean their houses themselves, when there were all these old tortoises willing and able to do the job for them? Now if the tortoise moves all your crap around so you can't find it, leaves streaks on your mirrors and windows, fire his scaly butt!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ModernMech 4y ago
  The parent is describing an inductive approach to worldbuilding, while you are describing a deductive approach. Two sides of the same coin.
didericis 4y ago
It's not just speculative. It's a retrospective on the early mainframe era. The nitty gritty punch card programming was something stereotypically done by middle aged/older women. Many early computers were massive and housed in what could be considered temples in big universities surrounded by gothic architecture. They were expensive to replace and kept around for long periods of time because of how difficult it was to upgrade (some large mainframe systems still exist today for that reason). Mechanical computers like the Babbage difference engine would last a lifetime. The idea of an average Joe spending all day using expensive compute time was insane. Those who focused on them did so for academic reasons, and spent most of their time meditating on computation, math, and the structure of language and meaning.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  It brings in those aesthetics, but then gives individuals as much computer time as they want. Then zero people make spreadsheets.
jay_kyburz 4y ago
Imagine a world where everybody simply has an AI assistant in their pocket, that simply tells them anything they might need to know. Design programs for you. Draw you any image. Perhaps even construct virtual worlds. We are almost there already. Only weird old people would bother to learn how to program dumb desktop computers.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  There's a lot of people who feel disquieted by the pace of software systems and aspire to do work in software that feels similar to the more methodological, slower paced work of more mature fields like HVAC engineering or structural engineering. These folks find solace in this kind of speculative fiction. I feel their disquiet is misplaced. Any young, fast-moving field is going to be full of the same issues that software is in now. You can look back at the history of mechanical engineering during the industrial revolution to see many similar problems we had with unsafe projects, hyped-up snake oil, or iteration for the sake of iteration. The history of automobiles and aviation was also marked by similar issues. Slower paced engineering fields are more mature and have gone through decades or centuries of iteration before coming up with tried and true solutions. But fundamentally fiction speaks to the soul more than it speaks to any measurable outcome. Truly the only fix for this disquiet is to search inside rather than look out. Fiction can be a great tool for that.
jkingsbery 4y ago
Good speculative fiction at least tries to give some reason why something might come to be the case. This article just says "pretend computers are old; old things are like X today; therefore, computers are going to be just like X," while ignoring all the things that are different.
sleepybrett 4y ago
This is not unlike the speculative future of Anathem.
Dalewyn 4y ago
>I can't conceive of such a world. One word: Terminals. Computers are inherently old at this point, the technology harkens back at least the better part of a century. The old guard in particular cannot and will not let go of CLIs and esoteric flags and arguments, and will berate anyone who would dare suggest anything concerning a GUI. To them, the only human interfaces that exist are the keyboard and the monochrome monitor, computing is still grey-on-black (or green/orange-on-black) monospace text and running emacs or vim. The rest of the world disregards them as living relics of ancient history.

tobr 4y ago

Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that someone would write a piece where computers were inherently old.

andai 4y ago
Expert prompt crafting!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- shagie 4y ago
  A sci-fi magazine has cut off submissions after a flood of AI-generated stories - https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt... > The science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld has been forced to stop accepting any new submissions from writers after it was bombarded with what it says were AI-generated stories. > The magazine officially shut off submissions on February 20 after a surge in stories that publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke says were clearly machine-written.
- code_duck 4y ago
  I got some pretty interesting sci-fi type results for that in Stable Diffusion. It helped to negative-prompt titles, text, words, etc
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  I'm so mad you made this comment before me.
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
This breaks immersion for a lot of people, me included. It's one of the biggest issues I have with lots of sci-fi (moreso than most other types of speculative fiction) novels. Just asserting a fact this fundamental and building your world around it only works if societies, culture, technologies, and history are build around it. Humanity's history with tools and automation are millenia old. To alter this would require a lot of changes. We've been automating, forgetting, copying, and maintaining technologies for as long as our history. Alien technology encounter stories satisfy some of this for me, as the injection of a foreign, advanced technology makes sense in this framework, much like how ancient peoples would discover technologies built by neighbors or rivals they didn't communicate regularly with.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  To some degree I agree with your last point. Before the idea of aliens, writers like Plato and Thomas Moore would posit some undiscovered island where they could imagine a culture unlike their own existing, which like with aliens, gave plausibility as to why that culture would have a different history and traditions than their own. Of course they, like many speculative writers today, were really writing about how they wished their own society worked.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  Hmmm. Good observations. I hope this doesn't break my interest in the Warhammer universe, lol, which I believe probably suffer from a lacking "origin story"
Jiro 4y ago
It's like asking "would you believe in homeopathy if doctors all told you that it was correct?" To which the answer is "Doctors believe things for reasons. You can't just flip a switch and change what doctors think without changing the entire world so that homeopathy is actually true, and that would be such a weird world that science in it would be unrecognizeable." (And since I'm not ChatGPT, I can answer your entire question: "Such a story would have an incoherent world. I could imagine someone writing a story that takes place in an incoherent world, but you wouldn't be able to get useful insights from it.")
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

Step 1: for some reason, the world stops making computers, but keeps the ones that already exist Step 2: 100 years pass Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines. Was that so hard?

curtisblaine 4y ago
Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply not believable: a society that has machines that could, at the minimum, help solving complex calculations and engineering problems much better than humans decides to completely ignore them. That's not how societies work.
- curtisblaine 4y ago
  Unless they have other means of solving those calculations better than computers; in that case, call those other means "computers" and the study of older computers "retro-computing".
  - em-bee 4y ago
    something like the amish, relying on 100 year old technology developed by humans instead of those newfangled tools that aliens brought that no human can understand.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  1 is easy to imagine - a large enough collapse that making new ones is very very hard, especially compared to scrounging and repurposing the huge amount of existing ones. Imagine a huge population decline, and search parties looking through the ruins for useful tech, like computers, decades later. Such a society could probably make new computers, but the cost of making new, much worse specced computers, may not be cost effective for a long time as long as old computers can be found and repaired. Edit: such a movie or novel would make for great Fallout-ish world-building. Imagine for instance a large hotel in a big city running the booking system on an old laptop in a central secure location, and new 8-bit computers used as terminals at the front desk. Public access 8-bit computer terminals at public libraries connected to copies of WikiPedia running on some old gaming rig and such things. :-)

vanderZwan 4y ago

You're basically missing the whole point of speculative fiction in this style, which is "we start with imagining a world which has these conclusions. Trying to imagine it forces us to try to make sense of what could lead to those conclusions." You assert it's incoherent. That's part of the point: it's incoherent with your current understanding of our current world. There might be other circumstances that lead to a such world without being incoherent. If the conclusions in a piece of speculative fiction are appealing, it may be worth thinking of what it takes to reach those conclusions. The thought exercise of trying to make it coherent is part of the point.

gweinberg 4y ago
No, the point is it can't be done. It's like cleaning your house with an 100 year old tortoise: you absolutely would do that, if tortoises were plentiful and do a good job cleaning. Why would anyone clean their houses themselves, when there were all these old tortoises willing and able to do the job for them? Now if the tortoise moves all your crap around so you can't find it, leaves streaks on your mirrors and windows, fire his scaly butt!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ModernMech 4y ago
The parent is describing an inductive approach to worldbuilding, while you are describing a deductive approach. Two sides of the same coin.

didericis 4y ago

It's not just speculative. It's a retrospective on the early mainframe era. The nitty gritty punch card programming was something stereotypically done by middle aged/older women. Many early computers were massive and housed in what could be considered temples in big universities surrounded by gothic architecture. They were expensive to replace and kept around for long periods of time because of how difficult it was to upgrade (some large mainframe systems still exist today for that reason). Mechanical computers like the Babbage difference engine would last a lifetime. The idea of an average Joe spending all day using expensive compute time was insane. Those who focused on them did so for academic reasons, and spent most of their time meditating on computation, math, and the structure of language and meaning.

Dylan16807 4y ago
It brings in those aesthetics, but then gives individuals as much computer time as they want. Then zero people make spreadsheets.

jay_kyburz 4y ago

Imagine a world where everybody simply has an AI assistant in their pocket, that simply tells them anything they might need to know. Design programs for you. Draw you any image. Perhaps even construct virtual worlds. We are almost there already. Only weird old people would bother to learn how to program dumb desktop computers.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago
There's a lot of people who feel disquieted by the pace of software systems and aspire to do work in software that feels similar to the more methodological, slower paced work of more mature fields like HVAC engineering or structural engineering. These folks find solace in this kind of speculative fiction. I feel their disquiet is misplaced. Any young, fast-moving field is going to be full of the same issues that software is in now. You can look back at the history of mechanical engineering during the industrial revolution to see many similar problems we had with unsafe projects, hyped-up snake oil, or iteration for the sake of iteration. The history of automobiles and aviation was also marked by similar issues. Slower paced engineering fields are more mature and have gone through decades or centuries of iteration before coming up with tried and true solutions. But fundamentally fiction speaks to the soul more than it speaks to any measurable outcome. Truly the only fix for this disquiet is to search inside rather than look out. Fiction can be a great tool for that.

jkingsbery 4y ago

Good speculative fiction at least tries to give some reason why something might come to be the case. This article just says "pretend computers are old; old things are like X today; therefore, computers are going to be just like X," while ignoring all the things that are different.

sleepybrett 4y ago

This is not unlike the speculative future of Anathem.

Dalewyn 4y ago

>I can't conceive of such a world. One word: Terminals. Computers are inherently old at this point, the technology harkens back at least the better part of a century. The old guard in particular cannot and will not let go of CLIs and esoteric flags and arguments, and will berate anyone who would dare suggest anything concerning a GUI. To them, the only human interfaces that exist are the keyboard and the monochrome monitor, computing is still grey-on-black (or green/orange-on-black) monospace text and running emacs or vim. The rest of the world disregards them as living relics of ancient history.