20 ms·

We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus

• rsynnott 3y ago
  > Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. While I think Stross is right on the money with this article, I would hope that the 'like' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here; last thing we need is some idiot billionaire summoning demons (as was, indeed, basically the plot of at least one Laundry Files book...) > And no tour of the idiocracy is complete without mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Facebook, who blew through ten billion dollars trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash IIRC Zuckerberg actually claimed to have been inspired by Rainbow's End. Presumably, in some alternate universe, taking inspiration from Vernor Vinge's other, better books, Facebook instead spent billions trying to make irritating talking spiders.
  • marktangotango 3y ago
    Vinges novella "True Names" for anyone interested.
  • floren 3y ago
    I've always wanted to write to Vinge and pick his brain about Rainbows End, because of all his novels (that I've read, anyway) it seems like the one that you could just about extrapolate from current tech and society... but it's also a bit unclear how much of this plausible future he thinks is a good idea, and how much is bad.
  • orthoxerox 3y ago
    > IIRC Zuckerberg actually claimed to have been inspired by Rainbow's End. Presumably, in some alternate universe, taking inspiration from Vernor Vinge's other, better books, Facebook instead spent billions trying to make irritating talking spiders. We should all be grateful he didn't think weaponised autism was a brilliant idea.
  • kybernetikos 3y ago
    Stross has also written many books firmly in the Sci-fi category without the Lovecraft. I particularly enjoyed Glasshouse, and his other works explore the idea of singularity, far future economy, and also what a non-singular future might look like. A lot of blame seems to be put on the Americans, but when I think of Scifi authors, I'm often thinking of Douglas Adams, Iain M Banks, Alistair Reynolds, Stross himself, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Richard K Morgan. The Brits have a lot to answer for too!
  • carapace 3y ago
    s/Rainbow's End/Rainbows End/
• whelp_24 3y ago
  I mean this a personal blog so i guess bias is the point but, the acknowledgement that all political philosophies are influenced by the time that they are created is missing (expect for the one time he apologetically admits to reading one of the books of bad publishers). This blogger completely misses the irony of having an extremely mainstream Californian outlook, probably because it's not the version that like billionaire men.
  • svnt 3y ago
    I would say the difference is the level of awareness and context for the two viewpoints. The author is more aware of what the other authors were really saying. The billionaires couldn’t do what they are doing if they were that aware, so instead they can’t help but grab significantly more out-of-context aspects of interesting worldviews and tie them together just enough to mask their limited time and interest in a more considered perspective. If the author were advocating for anticompetitive business practices and trying to use them to further his science fiction financial success based on a perusal of recent management texts, that is where we could say the same thing about the author that we can say in this context about the billionaires.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    He’s a Big Name sci-fi/fantasy author who lives in Scotland, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I don’t agree with everything he has to say in general, but the idea that he’s even remotely Californian is quite funny.
    • atypicaluser 3y ago
      The OP wrote— > of having an extremely mainstream Californian outlook One can have the outlook without the residency. And what is that outlook? Certainly not what CS imagines it to be, e.g. "uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick." If one wants the real California ideology, one only need look at Gavin Newsom and the Democratic Party supermajorities of a past decade-plus. Or at the policies enacted by San Fran, LA, and other major California cities in recent years. Scottish national policy as of late hasn't been too far off this mark. ;-)
• xrd 3y ago
  His blog post mentions people influenced (and misguided) by reading only American Sci-Fi. What are some examples of good "worldly" Sci-Fi? Or, good non-US Sci-Fi authors? Should I just check the Hugo and Nebula awards? I would like to expand my Sci-Fi palate.
  • jon-wood 3y ago
    The Three Body Problem trilogy is fantastic, and originating from China has quite a different feel to western sci-fi. Adrian Tchaikovsky is from the UK and has done some super interesting stuff as well, start with Children of Time.
    • chrisweekly 3y ago
      Also everything by Ken Liu (China) and Nick Harkaway (UK), and the Iain M Banks "Culture" novels.
      • Philpax 3y ago
        Ken Liu is Chinese-American, fyi
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • throwaway8877 3y ago
      It is a great way to understand how totalitarianism and Chinese nationalism influences world view. Highly recommended reading.
    • noir_lord 3y ago
      Neal Asher as well - The Culture but not as optimistic (under selling it there but close enough).
  • marktangotango 3y ago
    Ken Macleod is a Scottish sci-fi author I've enjoyed. Stanisław Lem and Ken Liu are two other well regarded authors; Poland and China respectively.
• er4hn 3y ago
  This is very detailed and a fun read. I'd done a similar set of research in 2022 as well: https://er4hn.info/blog/2022.08.23-tormentnexus/ https://er4hn.info/blog/2022.08.23-tormentnexus/
• robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s? I don't think it does. Imagine a pandemic without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years.
  • rideontime 3y ago
    Conspiracy theories relegated to usenet and little-heard AM radio stations. Sounds good to me.
    • airstrike 3y ago
      And my neighbor who believes the construction noises she's hearing at night are from the pedophile ring (led by Biden and Hillary) digging tunnels to transport children they sell online with their names disguised as SKUs on regular-looking furniture websites True story
      • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        She sounds like she likes to use her brain to solve exotic puzzles, she should take up Sudoko or something, instead?
  • uoaei 3y ago
    Would have been a pretty straightforward response with maybe less statistics. Increase production of masks and provide temporary assistance for people who would otherwise spread it at work. The most we could say tech did was allocate just-in-time logistics outputs a little more efficiently, except that just-in-time logistics were only a result of the tech you're referring to. We would still have contract warehouses across the country and world that could store and distribute basic provisions with a little bit of planning. Abundant visibility breeds a sense of abundant control, but when that sense goes beyond material reality we see technocrats fail. Vaccines did help a lot, that's true, but that success doesn't really generalize across tech per se.
    • 3y ago
• throwaway894345 3y ago
  Hey mods, can we update the link to point to use HTTPS instead of HTTP?
• causality0 3y ago
  Am I the only one who found it very odd that someone who isn't from a euro-using country gives the net worth of a bunch of other people from non-euro-using countries in euros?
  • Handprint4469 3y ago
    From the first line of the article: > This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023
    • causality0 3y ago
      Ah, that explains it. Thank you.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    > This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. He was giving a talk in a euro-using country to presumably a largely euro-using audience. I think dollars would have probably worked just as well.
  • NikolaNovak 3y ago
    I think because this is essentially a transcript of a speech, given to a largely Euro audience.
• gmuslera 3y ago
  The elephants in the room are 1984 and Brave New World. Not all science fiction is about technology, but it usually is about future. And some of the stories written as a warning ends being inspiration for some players, even if it is something not so original, but became popular enough to reach the right (or wrong) people.
• tempodox 3y ago
  > hyping the current grifter's fantasy of large language models as "artificial intelligence". Finally somebody says something sensible about that crap instead of mindlessly echoing the hype.
• bawolff 3y ago
  I found this kind of unconvincing. Yes we are the sum of our influences, good, bad and inbetween. How could we not be? But so what? Are we expecting people to not be influenced by the ideas of the past?
• devnullbrain 3y ago
  Political debate is such a waste of time. Why bother? Instead, write a book wrapping up all of your pet hates in the form of an antagonist, point a neon sign at them calling them evil, then use them to 'prove' that anything superficially similar in real life is also evil. AI? IDK, sounds a bit like Skynet! Once it's in a book or a film, it's unassailable. Hopefully the new Dune films will maintain its political leanings so a new generation will be able to 'prove' the rationality of feudalism and the radical efficiency of military sapphism.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    > military sapphism I don’t remember that in Dune, was it in a later book?
    • floren 3y ago
      God Emperor
    • monknomo 3y ago
      the books became progressively hornier as the series continued
      • kaashif 3y ago
        The sheer horniness of Chapterhouse Dune is crazy. The idea that sex goddesses from beyond known space were the antagonists is bizarre.
        • monknomo 3y ago
          I read that one around 14 or so, and even through a youthful hormone drenched haze I thought it was perhaps a little too horny...
        • AmericanChopper 3y ago
          It makes sense from a plot perspective, especially if you believe the theory that the honoured matres were a team-up of the bene geserit, the fish speakers, and the tleilaxu axolotl tanks.
• romanhn 3y ago
  Science fiction: a genre of speculative fiction, which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. Given sci-fi authors regularly speculate about all sorts of potential futures (and presents), is it really that hard to imagine that some of these futures might come true in some shape or form? It's really rich to trace modern implementations to decades-old ideas and then claim you were the one to create them. Get to pat oneself on the back while wagging a finger at the folks actually doing the building. Zuck's Metaverse would've likely existed without Snow Crash, though probably with a different name. And Motorola Razr would have likely existed without Star Trek communicators. I am not saying that all modern innovations are good ones or that some inspiration didn't take place, I just find the argument that their existence is entirely rooted in science fiction a weak one and full of survivorship bias.
  • davedx 3y ago
    Yup. Stross is insufferable in this regard. I find his blogs very hard going given the giant size of his ego.
  • Kapura 3y ago
    Given that the Zuckerverse has been a bust, and the motorola razr has now been replaced with the ubiquitous touchscreen-slab smartphone, I find it difficult to believe that either of these were inevitable, even as an intermediate step towards the next thing. But I think the author's main point isn't to point out that these things come from science fiction (these points are obvious). The point is that science fiction is _fiction_, and devoting huge amounts of real-world resources to build a fantasy isn't going great for solving the actual, real-world problems we face.
    • romanhn 3y ago
      Zuck's Metaverse may not be solving a problem you face, but it is solving one for Zuck (trying to, anyways) - controlling a distribution platform where potential competitors like Apple or Google cannot dictate terms. SpaceX and Starlink are solving plenty of real-world problems even if "get to Mars" is the long-term vision (and one I'm frankly thankful for, as little as I like Musk). LLMs are clearly a distinct phase in AI evolution, even if it's too early to talk of AGI - real-world applicability here is a bit more tenuous, but I certainly wouldn't throw it in the same bucket as, say, crypto. I think this idea that these explorations at the edge are a waste is a form of Luddism. Countless innovations that _do_ benefit humanity (including allowing us to have this conversation) have sprung out of them.
• throwaway_08932 3y ago
  > ...a belief in psi powers implicitly supports an ideology of racial supremacy, and indeed, that's about the only explanation I can see for Campbell's publication of the weirder stories of A. E. Van Vogt. Could somebody help me with this? I'd like to understand it.
  • sxp 3y ago
    In many stories with "magic", the magic potential of a person is passed down through bloodlines. So one could stretch this concept into a thinly veiled cover for racist beliefs that some bloodlines/races (Wizards, Jedi, Aryans, etc) are better than others. The better system IMO is where "magic" is something that a person picks up through hard work and training rather something that they're born with. But then this turns into a debate about whether IQ is nature vs nurture.
    • throwaway_08932 3y ago
      Got it, thank you for the explanation.
    • Filligree 3y ago
      > But then this turns into a debate about whether IQ is nature vs nurture. reply Isn't the answer always, for every metric ever considered, 'both'? The entire debate is a mystery to me.
    • chasd00 3y ago
      i always figured it was a shortcut to explain why there's only a few wizards instead of everyone being (or training to be) a wizard.
  • kmeisthax 3y ago
    "PSI powers" is a stand-in for special people with special powers that cannot be learned or transferred except through blood inheritance. The literature that invokes this trope often also makes the mistake of having the special people with special powers be oppressed by everyone else. Taken together, this is the "master race theory" with the serial numbers filed off - i.e. a group of people who are objectively better people being held back by subhumans. The reason why I call this a mistake is that humanity doesn't work this way. At all. Humanity does have superpowers - i.e. language, opposable thumbs, supra-tribal social structures - but these are all widespread if not universal. Differences in skill are functions of specialization and training and disability is compensated for rather than shunned. Some literature is smart enough to understand this and makes it very explicit that thinking your special powers make you inherently better than everyone else is a bad thing. The villain of the X-Men comics is Magneto and not Professor X for this reason. Harry Potter goes unusually deep[0] in explaining how wizarding society is cursed with all sorts of horrible fantasy racism, in ways I don't think a lot of HP fans have fully cognized[1]. You have the antagonist house Slytherin, full of wizards who coined the term "mudblood" to denigrate wizards who were born to muggle parents; the general shitty attitude that a lot of wizards (even Dumbledore) have to muggles; the fact that non-human sentient magical creatures are either treated poorly (goblins, giants) or outright enslaved (house elves); etc. Books that make this explicit avoid falling into the trap of magical fascism, but a lot of this literature just never bothers, either because the writers are bad at their job, or because they very explicitly believe the bullshit they're writing. Yes, there's a leap of logic here. The original writer probably should have included some of the steps they omitted to get from "PSI powers" to "racial supremacy". [0] Relative to J.K. Rowling's generally narrow and very England-centric reference pool. [1] If they haven't already sworn off Harry Potter because, well, y'know... J.K. Rowling.
• derefr 3y ago
  > In reality, aircraft autopilots don't do what most people think they do (they require constant monitoring by pilots) Tangent: what does an airplane's autopilot do? I always assumed it was basically doing lane-keeping within virtual flight-path lanes we've drawn in the sky. (Like the virtual 3D traffic grid above cities in depictions of cities with flying cars, but spread across the Atlantic.)
  • rpmisms 3y ago
    Follows heading and speed instructions, newer models can also be programmed using the flight plan to follow more complex directions. Autoland is also a thing now. Commercial aviation is a gigantic set of checklists, autopilot progressively does more of the checklist items. Autopilot is hilariously a fantastic name for the Tesla system. If people knew anything about how commercial aviation systems actually work, they would understand this
    • derefr 3y ago
      Sounds more like very simple cruise control, at least for the main leg of the flight. Though I suppose "follows heading instructions" can be complex? Does an autopilot "lane keep", in the sense of issuing corrections after hitting a turbulence "pothole", to return it to the flight path? Or does it just beep and shut off, telling the pilot to fix the heading? One thing I would expect "sufficiently-advanced autopilot" to do, would be to fly under/over/around large regions of turbulence on its own, and to then return to the original heading. Like driving around a large pothole, but the pothole can be 30 mins of flight-time large. (I'm guessing that this technology exists, but currently only in military aviation for long-distance fly-by-wire UAVs "swarms", not in commercial aviation for piloted aircraft.) Also, is there any actual logic for obstacle avoidance? If you steer two autopiloted planes toward each-other, do they "take evasive maneuvers", or do they just beep very loudly to get the pilots to do that? ...also, is the on-the-ground taxi-ing process automated? Because that seems like drudge-work that really could be automated — airports really seem like they have enough information about where everything is on the ground, and enough very strict rules about precedence when driving around the tarmac. (Heck, in theory the airport could centrally control taxi-ing with little tugboat-like robots that hug each plane's front wheel — I think I've seen this before?) And automating taxi-ing before take-off in particular, would free up some extremely critical time that could be used to be more thorough with preflight inspection.
• marcellus23 3y ago
  > (He named SpaceX's drone ships after Iain M. Banks spaceships, thereby proving that irony is dead) I don't get it. The Culture ships ("minds") are not cautionary tales about AI, or space, or anything like that. They're just AI-controlled spaceships. I don't know what point Stross is trying to make with this particular sentence. EDIT: it's been pointed out to me that this probably pointing out the irony of Musk being a hypercapitalist billionaire, while the Culture is a post-scarcity leftist utopia.
  • karaterobot 3y ago
    I was confused by this too. I thought the GSVs were pretty neat, and the world of The Culture was generally better for the median person than our world is. By far, probably. I'm aware that those books were originally intended to be a sort of parody of Star Trek's techno-utopianism, but I'll be honest, I'd trade either of those imaginary worlds for ours. Maybe Stross would say I'm credulous.
    • ceejayoz 3y ago
      Stross would point out Banks was an avowed socialist writing about space commies who change gender at will as the good guys, with Musk-style megabillionaires like Veppers as the bad guys.
      • throwaway4aday 3y ago
        In that case the irony is strongly in Musks favour with the failure of socialism to produce anything useful and the runaway success of a megabillionair in increasing access to space.
        • kmeisthax 3y ago
          >failure of socialism to produce anything useful The Soviets were kicking America's ass in the space race up until Kennedy said "Fuck everything, we're doing five blades[0]" and shot for the literal moon. They absolutely could produce useful things, the problem was that those useful things were produced at the expense of other, possibly more useful things. Eventually the US was able to exploit this by electing a crazy person to spook the Soviets into overspending on their military, which is why we survived with merely a huge deficit spending problem rather than extreme rationing and starvation. However, the gross misallocation of resources done under Soviet communism is not unique to Soviet communism. Capitalists do it all the time, the only difference is that free markets usually punish them for it quicker. But they don't always punish. People like Musk can still spend loads of other people's money on useless bullshit, like Twitter, or sending people to Mars[1]. [0] https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036 https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-bla... [1] Mars is a dead rock covered in poison constantly being blasted with radiation. It wants to kill you in more ways than regular ol' space wants to kill you, and making it not kill you is likely impossible given our current technological capability. Anyone going to Mars today will be condemning themselves to living the rest of their lives out in a very small bubble of rad-shielded underground bunker.
• gary_0 3y ago
  Pretty rich, coming from the author of Accelerando. ;) https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
  • bananaflag 3y ago
    He has been anti-Singularitarian for a long time https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-check-1.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality...
    • gary_0 3y ago
      Aye, I know (and it's obvious from TFA), hence the ";)".
• sneak 3y ago
  Why does someone who writes great sci-fi suddenly have social capital to weigh in on industry and politics, two things firmly outside of his wheelhouse? I get it, it's fashionable in Europe to hate billionaire American industrialists, but at what point did our hatred of capitalists (note: I don't hate capitalists) decide to overshadow our, you know, lifelong lust for the stars? Is there anyone else trying to build actual habitats (for actual people, not just a handful of taikonauts) in orbit on a timescale that would let people like Mr Stross and I see them (and perchance even use them) in our lifetime? The machinery of the state that European types like Stross seem to deify have not even announced plans in this direction, much less assembled teams and factories to move toward it. ESA and NASA and JAXA (nor Roscosmos or CNSA) ain't it, even if you 10x'd their funding. These are war and reconnaissance and research organizations, moving bulk humans off planet is completely orthogonal to any of their goals, stated or actual. Every time I read a technologist's screed against Musk or Bezos or Zuckerberg (three people whose combined lifetime works do not even scratch a fraction of the economic value incinerated by the US military in 40 weeks) all I can see is sour grapes and ad hominem. These people did not create nor perpetuate the attributes of the dystopia you claim to reside in (that was the CIA). (It's also not actually a dystopia, or anything resembling one; ask any of the two billion people lifted out of dirt poverty (largely due to technology!) in the last three decades.) The old planet will go to hell in its own way from its own inhabitants. I'd rather live in space where it's safer. (Also, how cool would it be to escape before Earth is finally fully conquered? This would mean that humans as a species successfully avoid a total hierarchy.)
  • KerrAvon 3y ago
    We can have both: space exploration and a more livable Earth. We don't have to choose. If you're serious about wanting to leave the planet, you should want the planet to be able to sustain life long enough to allow for that to happen. It may be a couple of hundred years yet, or maybe less. I cannot see a path that allows for sustainable colonies in Musk's lifetime. We would have had to start thirty-forty years ago.
  • davidgerard 3y ago
    > Why does someone who writes great sci-fi suddenly have social capital to weigh in on industry and politics, two things firmly outside of his wheelhouse? This does not show an understanding of science fiction.
• tivert 3y ago
  > Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real. ... > Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s? > It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. That is so true. I actually met someone who seriously wished to do what he could to make reality like a cyberpunk novel, completely oblivious to the fact that the books are dystopias. Tech people can be really, really, really dumb sometimes. That idiocy can go completely unchecked because they frequently arrogantly believe their type is smarter than everyone else.
  • beepbooptheory 3y ago
    I think chalking it up to just idiocy is a tad unfair. There are incentives everywhere to think like a marketing person or startup CEO, its what makes you a valuable employee. You write your cover letter and say, "I am very excited to work on the Torment Nexus" because you need, plainly, a job. But then with everything after that, you are not only authorized but encouraged to believe in the Torment Nexus by the people who matter most (people who pay wages). It's understandable that merely placing yourself in this world will slowly infect your mind, because there isn't anybody really telling you its wrong, and if they are, they are easily dismissed as luddites or socialists or whatever. And its not like the naysayers have some alternative money to offer you.
    • asdfman123 3y ago
      It's not borne out of stupidity: lots of the people involved know what they're doing. But when someone pushes an argument that could be disassembled by a bright middle schooler, it's okay to call it "stupid." If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
  • afroisalreadyin 3y ago
    What I also find interesting and revealing is how surprised they are when others find their vision of the future (the near and the far) scary and dystopic, and challenge them. I used to tell crypto bros (most of whom have done a quick transition to AI-brohood recently) why and how their idea of the crypto-driven economy sucked, and they would just treat me like a weirdo who just didn't get it. This is all before the big crash, of course. I guess part of it is how crypto was getting insane amounts of funding, which legitimized and corroborated the idea, and also created a strong echo chamber where they were shielded from criticism. Money is great at making you ignore that you might, just might, be completely wrong.
• hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  TESCREAL is one of the things I point to when people say e.g. "Just because I dress in a suit doesn't mean I'm well put together in my daily life." Of course wearing a suit and being having a life in order aren't strictly casually related. But the much weaker claim that they are positively correlated is one I'd be surprised to see disproved. Similarly, I find it hard to imagine someone who is T, E, S, C, R, and EA, but not L. They're out there, but all 7 ideas co-occur so often that they're an outlier among people who identify with, say, at least 4 of the 7 terms. There are many more such people who are straightforwardly all 7/7 than there are 6/7, even if there are six times as many ways to be 6/7 on TESCREAL. Framed this way it makes the fact that the Big Five genuinely don't appear very correlated to one another very impressive. (I'm not sure I fall under any of the 7 anymore, go figure. Maybe I'll come back one day. Credit where credit is due: The Russian Cosmist imperative to not just make everyone alive immortal, but resurrect everyone that ever died stirs my soul in a way few things have.)
  • kvonhorn 3y ago
    > resurrect everyone that ever died I don't like the idea of Mormons baptizing the dead without their consent, full on resurrection without consent seems even more intrusive. Followup question: would immortality be forced, or could one choose to commit suicide?
    • sangnoir 3y ago
      Ian M. Banks novel Surface Detail (light spoiler follows) speculates on how resurrection might not be pleasant for everyone involved. If we had the technology to resurrect people today, can you imagine how valuable it would be for military and intelligence-gathering purposes? Or skirting around labor laws? (see Lena by qntm). How technology is used is always determined by our political and economic regime.
• this_user 3y ago
  If you don't want people to try to build it, then don't give it an awesome name.
• cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  "The future is a marketing tool." Exactly. Reminds me of the quote from genius modernist sculptor Naum Gabo: "Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will."
• montefischer 3y ago
  The thrust of this article is its final sentence: "that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas." Be careful of non-approved thinking! Also strange is how caring about the future is dastardly 'longtermism', but caring enough about this generation to work on longevity is 'insane'. Really the only acceptable goals are averting climate catastrophe (presumably by stopping oil and gas consumption) and helping the global poor. It would be interesting to know whether the author thinks the global poor should be prevented from using fossil fuels to better their immediate economic situation at the expense of our long-term climate.
  • throwaway4aday 3y ago
    Pre-approved thinking is a good description of this article.
  • dsign 3y ago
    I have my ideas on that; I'm wrapping them in a science fiction novel...wait...
  • tivert 3y ago
    > Also strange is how caring about the future is dastardly 'longtermism'... I think you misunderstood. The dastardly thing isn't caring about the future, it's using your supposed care about the future to neglect and damage the present. And that care isn't really care, it's just working to implement some perhaps unrealizable sci-fi fantasy.
• PicassoCTs 3y ago
  The real problem is see, is that even those with the greatest power, proclaim to be powerless and there biggest endeavor is to finally escape all responsibility. Meaning, if chosen politicians are in it for 4 years and after that who cares. There is nobody at the helm at any given moment. Meaning, congrats to the anarchists.
• TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Oh god. As much as I respected 'cstross, the kind of outlook culminating in this essay starts to read to me as "I'm gonna shit on scientific and technological progress, because I can't have a career as a sci-fi writer if the -fi parts become real too fast". I get the idea that some ideas are better not realized. I get one may not like people, or business models. But shitting on SpaceX and NuSpace in general, or most recently, on LLMs? That's plain ridiculous. Reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote about things invented after one's 35. Such a sad, depressing outlook in times where we need to look forward, rekindle hope, have some dreams. And I don't mean we should ignore current problems - just that it's hard to solve anything when people have no hope and succumb to crabs-in-bucket mentality. And assigning blame to random convenient targets, particularly any one that dare to present a positive outlook (justified or not) is definitely not helping solve anything. It's just reinforcing the fucking depressing mess of a zeitgeist we have today.
  • camdenlock 3y ago
    Yep, this article is a desperate cry from an obnoxious hack to assert his relevance. See also: Cory Doctorow.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I did not mean that. 'cstross is smart, writes very well and remains relevant. But I strongly disagree with the outlook of this essay, and the overall vibe I've been getting from his blog in the past couple years; I also find it depressing that it seems to be increasingly representative of the "tech industry counter-culture", for lack of a better name.
      • rbanffy 3y ago
        It doesn’t feel like he’s shitting on SpaceX. His point is still valid, however, in that we should not divert resources from, say, COVID vaccines for everyone to immortality for the über-rich. We saw how social networks were used to destabilise democracies we took as invulnerable to such meddling. We saw how placing the accumulation of capital over all things including the welfare of our species can lead to dangerous priorities.
• gojomo 3y ago
  I agree with Stross's admonition, "always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas", and believe it doubly-so when they are opining on actual science, social science, & politics – areas where understanding may not correlate, and may even anti-correlate, with the imaginative talents that make a good science fiction author. Technologists inspired by SF, even dystopian SF, don't want the dystopia, but the other advances pictured with the abuses or problems elided or checked. And, having seen one or more renditions of the dystopic aspects, have extra confidence (sometimes but not always misplaced) that by referencing & even popularizing the inspirational works, more people will work on a better version of what was depicted. Even dystopic fiction, and cautionary talks likes Stross's here, are thus often, operationally, accelerative. "Well, now we've read the warning insert, & recommended it to everyone who'll listen, let's assemble this stuff without all those foreseeable mistakes." (Compare: Truffaut's observation: "It is impossible to make an anti-war film." The mere exercise of converting it to a narrative, in that medium, creates an artifact that many people, & time, tends to transform into a glorification of related themes & extremes.) Stasis where we are now, without radical new efficiencies (tech), would lead to a relatively short & nasty confined run for the human race. (And that's if it were even possible, which it's not without an oppressive/suppressive unitary world government.) Degrowth and/or a return to a mythic nostalgic pastoralism would kill billions. (And is equally impossible without an oppressive/suppressive unitary world government.) Even socialism/communism draws heavily from the hand-wavy extrapolative imaginings of Marx – a political economy science fiction writer, whose historical determinism prefigured 'dark singularitarian' Eliezer Yudkowsky's certainty "we're all gonna die". (Neither of these totalizing visions seem to yield much when the real world & real history prove more complicated.) It's up-or-out for humanity – and so many people realizing that is why science fiction is more popular than ever, wherever it falls on the utopic-dystopic spectrum, as our best guide to finding the sweet spots, & avoiding the foreseeable problems, of a big and ever-changing future.
• hax0ron3 3y ago
  Interesting read, but to me this essay projects an attitude "of course my particular brand of progressive politics* is correct, I don't need to justify it, it's obvious to all right-minded people", and I find that to be grating. The author rails against all sorts of various viewpoints and movements that he thinks are dangerous, ranging from transhumanism to fascism to right-libertarianism to accelerationism to rationalism to tech industry hype. And, while I agree that these movements can be dangerous, some obviously so, some less obviously, I think that the essay goes overboard in trying to paint them as a connected monolith of undiluted bad, despite the only tenuous relations that many of them have with each other. There is a lot of good that can come out of some of these movements. Sure, a large part of rationalism is very cult-like and silly and I myself not infrequently make fun of it for that. But there are also many interesting non cult-like thinkers in that community. I try to take the good where I can find it. As for tech billionaires, well I think that for example Elon Musk is a scam artist and a fraud for his robotaxi hype, but that does not negate the fact that his spacecraft seem to work well and are an interesting move forward in humanity's exploration of space. I think that there has been a lot of unrealistic over-optimism about the pace of AI technology development and we are probably not anywhere close to general artificial intelligence, and I certainly don't think that a tech singularity is right around the corner, but that does not negate the fact that there have been some genuine huge steps forward in AI in the last decade and there are many constructive and beneficial things that this technology can do. If humanity consistently thought like Charlie Stross does, I am not sure that we would be out of the Stone Age yet. *I say particular brand because not even all progressives agree with him. There are progressive rationalists, progressive transhumanists, etc.
• cubefox 3y ago
  > hyping the current grifter's fantasy of large language models as "artificial intelligence" I really can't take him seriously after that remark. No, language models are of course artificial intelligence, they are systems so impressive that they were considered decades away before GPT-3 released a few years ago, or, to most, even before ChatGPT, just one year ago. They of course aren't precisely the classical SciFi intelligence that Stross and his colleagues had in mind in the past decades, but that speaks against them, not against the status of language models as AI. By the way, a better SF writer, Stanisław Lem, did predict something similar to language models: Systems that would read novels of one author and then produce similar novels as output. Basically an LM without fine-tuning. What Stross does is the classic goal-post moving, where anything more narrow than human intelligence is ultimately dismissed as not real AI. As an added bonus, he lampoons concerns about such "real" AI scaling to superintelligence as being totally speculative. Basically, either it's not real or it's just irresponsible speculation, simple, case closed!
  • ben_w 3y ago
    I've not read Stanisław Lem (and have only seen the western adaption of Solaris, not the original), and I would therefore add an additional example, the three levels of AI used by Alastair Reynolds in Revelation Space (published in 2000): Alpha (sentient brain uploads); beta (non-sentient simulations based on what you do and say in your life, so kinda like GPT even though he didn't have that as an example to write from); and gamma (basically just normal programs).
  • I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    The people most against LLMs being described as AI seem to be the people who have a pre-existing notion for what AI is, and they point to all the things it can't do as reasons why it isn't actually AI. I've considered LLMs to be a piece of a greater and more complete AI in the same way our vocal cords are a piece of our internal thoughts manifesting in the real world so other people can hear them. So an LLM is a great speaker, but it doesn't understand what it's saying. Does it need to? Do my vocal cords need to understand the stream of vibrations my brain asks for, or just respond? Understanding speech takes place at a different layer than merely repeating the "correct" speech. Now all we need to do is attach the LLM output to a database for long term context storage, overlay a constant weight adjustment daemon that the LLM can trigger to control how it "learns", and tie the LLM temperature to /dev/random so it has mood swings like all of us meatbags do. THEN it will be a perfect human-like AI :P
• karaterobot 3y ago
  It's not realistic to call for people to continue reading science fiction but not be influenced by it, and it's not realistic to tell people how they should interpret ideas in science fiction. If the author thinks a technology in their books is problematic, someone is always going to say "yes it's a problem in the book, but the problems are part of a fictional narrative, whereas the idea, which is good, transcends that narrative and need not have those problems which were assigned to them arbitrarily by the author".
• msabalau 3y ago
  Good essay/speech. Pedantically, I wonder about: "the readers Gernsback was cultivating didn't ask about the politics of radio" with this coming back to haunt them in the 1930s. Both radio enthusiasts Gernsback are talking about the politics of radio and regulation as early as 1912. Yeah, US Science Fiction, and US literature generally move in the direction of being increasingly willfully blind to politics, but I believe that's more of a post-war/cold war trend.
• zackmorris 3y ago
  UBI. Tax the rich. I'd vote to create a 10-50% tax on the morbidly rich, to be paid back to everyone in the world as UBI. 10% is the tithing rate, something that people understand. 50% represents civic duty, a moral responsibility to acknowledge society's role in maintaining the infrastructure that allows wealth creation. Or we could just tax them 100% for a while and.. nothing bad would happen. Which is hilariously tragic. Of course billionaires want to pay 0% and fund effective altruism projects personally. That makes a big assumption though, that the rich know what needs to be fixed better than the poor. Which is nonsense from both religious and secular standpoints. Religious because all have equal dignity as conscious living beings. Secular because money is an arbitrary measure of fitness. Billionaires are like children with little or no life experience outside of wealth acquisition. They're ultimate expressions of ego, with all soul stripped away, vying to become the emperor on Star Wars to live forever as the devil's right hand man. To put it lightly. The opposite of a billionaire looks like Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Howard Zinn, John Lennon, Marianne Williamson, the list is long. Combatting billionaires outwardly like bullies is difficult. But combatting them inwardly by shifting our consciousness towards peace is viable. Which looks like wokeism, progressism, leftism, socialism, communism, humanism, animism, pantheism, entertaining the idea of reincarnation.. all the bad words that billionaires hate on and spread sentiment against through propaganda. Again the list is long. But if we care about preventing the human race from being subjugated under the yoke of tech tyranny, they are good places to start. There are meta levels to that. For example, Martin Luther King Jr advocated for labor as much as racial equality. Feminism defends human rights as well as gender equality. All the stuff they don't teach in schools is exactly the understanding needed to defeat the status quo. I still hope that we find a way to transcend this suffering, even though I've seen no evidence of that happening so far in my lifetime. Sometimes I wonder if this is the revolution that will not be televised. Like what would it take to really organize and roll out something like UBI through existing infrastructure, with philosophies borrowed from stuff like open source? And what force will the powers that be use to suppress that on all fronts? Once we view that world through that lens, the oppression becomes obvious and unmistakable as we watch all the capital in the world get siphoned into the corporate black holes of billionaires, so that it can't be used to, I dunno, give everyone all the food they need. I wish I had the answers, but I have to get back to work to afford the crumbs of my existence.
• lencastre 3y ago
  At least it’s not like I have no mouth and I must scream. /s
• at_a_remove 3y ago
  I am not especially fond of this. Reactions, in no particular order: 1) Pulling Ayn Rand in just to bash on her is both a stretch to what might be called science fiction and reeks of simply burning an effigy. 2) I think we're finally at the tipping point where the left has switched from relentlessly working some kind of reference to Trump into their ongoing outrage, or simply as a tribe-signaling device (see "Trump Derangement Syndrome") and on to the injection of Musk. Call it "Conservation of Goldstein." 3) Mentions Gernsback and not the most excellent sci-fi story "The Gernsback Continuum"? Poor showing. 4) Cory Doctorow's feelings about "The Cold Equations" are a real froth-fest and reek of a different sort of irrational optimism, the avoidance of what are called "lifeboat politics." I would avoid citing him on that particular issue. 5) Banging on Campbell like that, also tacky A) given that psi powers were absolutely under consideration for quite a long time, we're only about fifty years past that, roughly at the time there was scientific consensus that, yes, we do have plate tectonics, B) the statement that "a belief in psi powers implicitly supports an ideology of racial supremacy" absolutely does not track and is a cheap smear. 6) He name-drops Jack Parsons without pointing out his philosophies. 7) Because right now we have to have some kind of anti-Russian sentiment, he picks Nicholas Berdyaev, and just wildly ignores the parallel thoughts of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which gave rise to Frank Tipler's concept of a grand unification at the end of the universe of all thinking beings. It might be summarized in the philosophy "Everything that rises must converge," which made its way into the writings of Flannery O'Connor and a Shriekback tune. But we have to shake our fists at those Ruskies, so we pick this one. 8) What a narrow slice of Rationalism he's introduced us to. "So, these Catholics, they're ritual cannibals," as if that were all we needed to know. And he seems to think that perhaps we ought not to look at the possible implications of the far-ranging impacts of AI, which doesn't need to be particularly intelligent or even malevolent to cause damage, especially if you're a man taken for a box of vegetables. 9) Worse yet, he's looked at the past of sci-fi writers and ignored the past of politics: recall Reagan's SDI proposal, getting smeared as "Star Wars." No, this is just general rage at people with enough money to try out some wild ideas (and I am no fan at all of the whole Mars business). Wild ideas that size always need a lot of money behind them, and this has gone on through history. Most fall through, sometimes we land on the Moon, sometimes we invent nukes. They all sound science-fictiony when we start, but the core premise that the science fiction writers themselves created various concepts, without which the apparently bumbling golems of industry would not have anything to blow their money on? It's ridiculous. People have pursued longevity probably roughly around the time as they figured out that they, too, were going to die. At first it would have been practical business, like avoiding tigers or not eating the red berries, but after a while it becomes prayers and on to potions. Transhumanism? That's little more than wanting to exceed our limits. We probably first did it with tools, and also for cosmetic purposes, but then people wanted those reaches past what had been built-in to their bodies. Again, probably existed before writing, as humans dreamed of being ascended demigods. Effective altruism, ah, the terrible concept of wanting your charity to go to someone who actually needed it. Existed since the first malingerer, the first false beggar was discovered. But let's mention Sam Bankman-Fried so we can make that concept sound bad. Gosh, the more I look at this essay, the more the cheap tricks stand out. I feel like I could go on and on.
• PoignardAzur 3y ago
  > (Longtermism is the belief that we should discount short-term harms to real existing human beings—such as human-induced climate change—if it brings us closer to the goal of colonizing the universe, because the needs of trillions of future people who don't actually exist yet obviously outweigh the needs of today's global poor.) > Finally, I haven't really described Rationalism. It's a rather weird internet mediated cult that has congealed around philosopher of AI Eliezer Yudkowski over the past decade or so. Yudkowski has taken on board the idea of the AI Singularity—that we will achieve human-equivalent intelligence in a can, [...] and terrified himself with visions of paperclip maximizers, AIs programmed to turn the entire universe into paperclips [...] with maximum efficiency. Here's your shipment of cheap strawmen, where do you want them delivered?
  • margalabargala 3y ago
    Agree regarding the description of rationalism being a little dramatic, but if anything, the description of Longtermism is generous. As a movement it's a lot closer to religion than philosophy.
• ulizzle 3y ago
  Great name, “torment nexus”. Credit where credits due
• creer 3y ago
  Perhaps just as usefully, calling it idiocy is not how you are going to change things. What could change things? - "There should be a law" (1) really never solves anything, (2) pushes stuff in the next jurisdiction. See attempts at killing generally available cryptography and Cypherpunks. Genuine success by the techies there. Law / policy is insufficient by itself. - Social media does get people thinking. A little. "The press should..." yeah maybe but the press doesn't so we do what we can. - Scifi authors write scifi. It's what they do. And essays sell sci-fi. And their essays are broadly commented on: THEY have a voice. Not going to change. - Outfunding the good while dis-incentivizing the bad might work: This is a field with massive ongoing progress that people are legitimately proud of. If these (many but finite number of) people can work "in the right direction", then they work less "in the wrong direction". Government funding might be the rare thing that can outspend advertising funding. Still, many people will chase AI work directly out of the large military budgets, in many countries with varied political systems. Meaning lots of people working in these directions no matter what. Meaning lots of spillovers from that no matter what else. - Having the better AIs beat up the worse AIs? Hmmm, I don't want to be caught in the middle of this. Actually this is a field for sci-fi authors to plow some effort into. And for AI game theorists? What does this look like? - Having the better AI fields be massively more profitable than the "bad" - so that the talented hopeful head in these directions more readily? Currently advertising AI and medical AI might be the highest profit potential, with military close in there? Self-driving AI probably pays well already now. But most of these run "general AI" labs in the name of "progress is progress". - More money into "AI ethics"? So far the results are underwhelming but not a reason to stop. Other practical suggestions?
• dsign 3y ago
  > raw book manuscripts are about as appetizing as a raw animal carcass, they take a lot of work to make them appealing Yes and no. I've read perfectly good manuscripts (because their authors did put a lot of work on them) before they went through the pipe of traditional publishing. And then I re-read them at the other end. They weren't any better, just shorter and more mainstream. Also, they didn't sell well at all, no matter how trad-published they were, because, guess what, neither the author nor the trad-publisher were very good at marketing in this day and age :/ .
• l8_to_catch_up 3y ago
  I truly appreciate the opinionated and detailed blog post, but maybe we should start calling Silicon Valley billionaires, and their endeavors, as the Nexus Of Torments for politically-minded liberal arts majors.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    Tormentors is right there.
• ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago
  The fact that more than half of this essay resides inside the unclosed double brackets is either a mean joke or a suspense-building trick.
• Vegenoid 3y ago
  > Longtermism is the belief that we should discount short-term harms to real existing human beings—such as human-induced climate change—if it brings us closer to the goal of colonizing the universe, because the needs of trillions of future people who don't actually exist yet obviously outweigh the needs of today's global poor. Whenever I see people talking about longtermism this way, I'm a bit confused. I've always thought of climate change being one of the things that longtermists care a lot about. I read 'What We Owe the Future' briefly, and could be misremembering, but I recall it being heavy on climate change being a major issue because of the long-lasting impact it could have. It feels like it became popular to shit on longtermism because some billionaires are into it, and the views of people who it resonates with are carelessly misconstrued. If the label really is now just for a fuck-earth-colonize-space view, what is the acceptable term for the view that long-term impacts should be a primary concern when allocating resources towards solving problems?
• cthalupa 3y ago
  Most of this tracks, except for picking Gerard O'Neill for the reason Bezos is into dystopian futurism. O'Neill's a real deal physicist - he's the person who first theorized that you could use storage rings as the basis for particle accelerators. He spent significant time doing real research into space colonization. He wrote some books, sure, but they were more to try and promote his ideas than the core thesis of Stross - that science fiction technologies are written primarily as set dressing to facilitate the story. He might not agree with O'Neill's ideas on space colonization but it does not seem to be a fair to paint them in the same brush as his metaphorical Torment Nexus.
• yew 3y ago
  Ah, Stross has the TESCREAL brainworms. I'd been wondering how long that would take. (I'm starting to really feel the point of demanding justice through violence. Some people are only willing to let others live at the moment their face hits the pavement.)
• Vecr 3y ago
  I think this confuses people who want the singularity to happen (accelerationists) vs people who think it might happen but must be prevented, or at least delayed until people can figure out how to do it correctly, and if that's not possible, we should cut our losses and live in a world that's not great, but is at least not maximally bad.
• lawrenceyan 3y ago
  It's weird that one of the science fiction authors I grew up reading is so pessimistic about the future.