16 ms·

Neal Stephenson was prescient about our AI age

149 points by Rant423 3y ago

flir 3y ago
This article's wrong. It's not the Illustrated Primer that presages the chatbots, it's the Librarian in Snow Crash. His "intelligence without consciousness" take is spookily accurate, I think.
- kromem 3y ago
  Not really. He multiple times goes out of his way to have the Librarian state that it cannot understand analogy. There's literally a paper on improved success at prompting by having a model create an analogous problem, solve that, and apply the approach to the original problem: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01714 https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01714
jpm_sd 3y ago
https://archive.is/mBH2q https://archive.is/mBH2q
suoduandao3 3y ago
The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book. I was intrigued to learn it's also one of the top recommended books by Tim Ferris guests. I wonder how many separate reasons there were for that.
- histories 3y ago
  "Kids need to get answers from humans who love them". https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_stephenson_author_geek_and_now_sword/c53o23x/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_st...
  - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
    Thank you for sharing this! The Diamond Age was one of my favorite books and Neil's answer distilled and clarified a major theme of the book perfectly.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    God dammit I wish I had seen that a few months ago when there was a dozens-long HN thread where people were arguing that that wasn't what he meant or that it wasn't important to the success/failure of the different branches of that project in the book.
- Karellen 3y ago
  > The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book. Wait, did you mean The Diamond Age is an excellent book? Or... has someone made/written the book-within-the-book into an actual (e-?)book?
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    The full title of the book is The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
    - Karellen 3y ago
      Yeah, but if you're referring to a book, it's customary to refer to it by its main title, rather than just its subtitle. Especially when the subtitle is also the name of a different book, even if that book is a fictional book within the book. If I started talking about how great The Modern Prometheus is, people would generally either a) be very confused, or b) think I was a totally pretentious dickwad for not simply calling it Frankenstein.
      - suoduandao3 3y ago
        I guess that's a misunderstanding of protocols on my part, because the subtitle began with 'or', I assumed 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' was an alternate title and an alternate way to refer to it.
  - sl-1 3y ago
    I think it is the subtext of the book: "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
  - exe34 3y ago
    I kept thinking it should be possible to make something like it back in the day, and now with LLMs and deepfake, it's even closer to reality!
    - 3y ago
- timmg 3y ago
  Interestingly, I started reading it over xmas break -- based on a recommendation. I got, probably, a quarter of the way through it before I went back to work. And I haven't felt the urge to pick it up again. I was reading above comments about how liking NS is a matter of taste. So I'm not sure if I just "don't get it" or if maybe it's just "not my type of story." FWIW, so far, I just simply don't care about any of the characters. Just curious for those that like the novel: should I? Or is it more about the ruminations of technology that is important in this book?
  - suoduandao3 3y ago
    Like a lot of nerdy scifi writers, NS's characters can come off a little... archetypal rather than complex or subtle. It's a lot more pronounced in his shorter works, as there's a lot more internal dialogue in his longer ones - if you find that a deal breaker, it's not confined to the start of the book. It might help to think of the characters as archetypal because he's writing about the future and these archetypes will be present in the future - the people who make history will seem a bit cartoonish because they'll be more extreme in their behaviour. And if that doesn't satisfy you might still like his longer books like Anathem - the characters were still recognizeable there, but there was a lot more humanity to their behaviour.
  - pchristensen 3y ago
    I’ve read a couple NS books. I feel like the plots and characters are the dues to be paid in order to explore the SCI for concepts and worlds. Kind of like the stitching between action/chase scenes in a Fast and Furious movie. The plot is not the point.
batch12 3y ago
I'll probably get roasted for this, but- After reading all the love here for Stephenson here for years, I went and bought a few books (snow crash, diamond age, etc), intending to power through them. I am a pretty avid reader when I am in the mood and enjoy fiction including sci-fi, fantasy, *punk, etc. I couldn't get through Snow Crash. It didn't feel like a finished book to me. If I remember correctly it seemed like things like river names had placeholders and even saw some errors in the text. What am I missing?
- imp0cat 3y ago
  They are not for the faint of heart. :) But I personally found both Snow Crash and Diamond Age quite interesting.
- devilbunny 3y ago
  If you don’t like Snow Crash, you probably just won’t like Stephenson. If you don’t like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, you definitely shouldn’t bother with the rest of his works. You’ve tried him fairly; he’s just not for you.
  - MarcScott 3y ago
    I didn't like either of them very much, but I've really enjoyed other books of his. - The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. - Seveneves - Cryptonomicon - Anathem - Reamde - Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (Although the metaworld parts in that get a little tiresome)
    - ElevenLathe 3y ago
      Yeah honestly he just keeps getting better IMO. Seveneves in particular gives me chills just thinking about -- so dark at points. Likewise, I think the Blue Ant books are Gibson's best work, though I have a strong attachment to Mona Lisa Overdrive just because of where I was in life when I first read it.
      - themadturk 3y ago
hprotagonist 3y ago
gargoyles -- never, ever, ever gonna be cool. Trust me.
- ooterness 3y ago
  But the Apple Gargoyle Pro is cool, right? It has an outward-facing display that shows your eyes.
asah 3y ago
Given the topic, I would disappointed if this article were written entirely by a human.
- what-the-grump 3y ago
  Its paywalled, so it right there with the topic and classism.
thunderbong 3y ago
https://archive.is/newest/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/02/chatbots-ai-neal-stephenson-diamond-age/677364/ https://archive.is/newest/https://www.theatlantic.com/techno...
eigenket 3y ago
I think the most prescient prediction he made about AI is this from Anathem. The concrete prediction is that the internet will become filled with AI written crap, and that anyone wanting to use it will have to filter out an enormous amount of AI nonsense, before they reach any useful information. To translate: reticulum means internet, syndevs means computers. > “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. > “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. > “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.” > “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone. > “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.” > “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.” > “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Anathem is my personal favorite of his for precisely this vision of near future history, and what the world does about it.
- JohnDeHope 3y ago
  Thanks for this quote. "Artificial Inanity" seems about as useful of a concept as "negative information" (from Foundation?) has been.
canistel 3y ago
Cryptocurrency too - in Cryptonomicon. Not exactly as it is used today, but along similar lines...
- p_l 3y ago
  Cryptocurrency was a hotly, if niche, debated topic in 1990s, which formed the backbone for Stephenson writing Cryptonomicon.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
I haven't finished the article yet and am currently reading it. But FWIW I'll just park this howler from the first paragraph here: > "prophesying what innovations are to come" No. Prophesy is the ability to see or correctly guess the future - a future that would have happened without the prophecy. Christopher Hitchens nailed it absolutely when he noted that science fiction is rarely prophetic, rather it's taken as a blueprint for post-facto design. It is self-fulfilling, influential fiction.
- gitfan86 3y ago
  It seems unlikely that there has ever been someone making a prediction, never telling anyone about the prediction and then living his life as if he never made the prediction. I predict that Donald Trump will claim election fraud in states he loses in 2024. Is that self fulfilling if it happens since I said it publicly?
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    There's some difference between an author like George Orwell writing a detailed novel which enters popular culture and sells millions of copies - and two blokes at the pub saying the royal family are lizards controlled by the saucer-people.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    > Is that self fulfilling if it happens since I said it publicly? No. It would be self-fulfilling if Donald Trump claimed election fraud specifically (as in, he's explicitly announcing it!) because gitfan86 said it would happen. If you look at something like the metaverse, a lot of the people trying to build a metaverse are explicitly citing stuff like Snow Crash as the motivation for what they're trying to build. That's what makes it self-fulfilling--the people trying to build the thing in the real world are using the fiction as a blueprint.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
imgabe 3y ago
It’s worth noting that in the book the “AI” is partly a live connection to a human being.
tempaway74641 3y ago
I dont get whats supposed to be prescient about writing a book with an AI in it, in 1995. And nearly three decades before the release of ChatGPT, he presaged the current AI revolution. This claim seems to hinge on on the Primer in the Diamond Age which uses an actor to read out its text, which is taken as a metaphor for ChatGPT being built on human output. I mean, the Primer/Ractor combo seems like a cool thing to have in a book, but I don't see why this is a 'most stunning prediction'
dumbmrblah 3y ago
https://archive.is/mBH2q https://archive.is/mBH2q
williamcotton 3y ago
Gibson > Stephenson Whenever I think I am remembering Snow Crash, I’m actually thinking of characters and plot lines from Neuromancer!
- Cheer2171 3y ago
  That is because Stephenson is intentionally parodying Gibson.
  - Krasnol 3y ago
    ...and didn't bother much describing the world his story takes place in because he expected you to know Gibson's Cyberpunk already.
gilbetron 3y ago
I've been a fan of his since Snowcrash came out, and was hoping the article would be interesting, but instead it reads like someone that has consumed too many of his own press releases. Starting off with, "It’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate," was really disappointing.
koryk 3y ago
Gen AI and its potential impact has been covered by Stephenson multiple times. I wrote a short post on some of the references in Anathem. It's also a large plot point in Fall or Dodge in Hell. One of the characters open sources some generative ai to fill the internet with slightly untrue spam. https://medium.com/@k0ryk/neal-stephensons-llm-predictions-7fbb3b39607 https://medium.com/@k0ryk/neal-stephensons-llm-predictions-7...
SkyMarshal 3y ago
I would argue an equally prescient prediction of his is from Snowcrash, the use of sophisticated disinformation and psyops to mass-reprogram the human race, and the innate immunity or resistance to it that some people have. That vision of the future is now playing out in realtime.
queuebert 3y ago
Just out of curiosity, do pieces like these get written because a journalist is randomly interested in the idea, or does the author's publisher reach out to the magazine and suggest a puff piece topic?
- simonw 3y ago
  Very much both. Plenty of pieces like this are PR-driven, but quality publications are always looking to write interesting pieces independently of PR pitches. Many pieces come about because an individual journalist pitches an idea to their editor.
Kaibeezy 3y ago
From my perspective, Stephenson appears to have been engineered to meet my optimal reading specification. This improbability makes it among the best evidence I have that I am living in a simulation, along with the sound of Wayne Rogers (guitarist, not actor), the flavor of fresh doogh, the A944 west of Alford, several others.
EdwardCoffin 3y ago
Talking about Neal Stephenson's works always brings up several topics: endings and editing. He's responded to criticisms of his endings in various book talks, for instance his Author's at Google talk about Anathem [1] (prepositioned to the relevant bit @10:54). One of his editor's at Wired magazine also made a comment about editing his work in his book talk about Fall or Dodge in Hell at the Interval [2]. This is a transcript of a part of the Authors at Google talk for Anathem (first link prepositioned to 10:54): [10:54] Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it. [11:11] A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently. [11:21] But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things. I've seen people complain, for example, that Snow Crash doesn't have a good ending. But I can remember that at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby Dick. There's a helicopter that gets brought down, and there's a private jet that blows up, some people die, there's confrontations, and the girl goes home with her mom, it seems like a good ending to me. So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is. [12:59] For The Baroque Cycle, I created a kind of NORAD bunker in which to write the ending. It was this complete, you know, the wall, the ceiling, the floor, they were completely covered with timelines, charts, and all kinds of technology that I was using to bring all the plot lines together into an end. [13:27] I think Anathem does ok on that score. I'm sure I'll be hearing from some of the Stephenson can't write endings people, but I think it's got a decent enough ending on this one. This is a transcript of an unknown (to me) Wired editor talking about Stephenson's copy: I will tell you I was working under Kevin at Wired when Neil did a story of following the fiberoptic cable around the world, and it was a forty five thousand word piece, and I will say when you brought the copy in I could not improve it as an editor. It was the cleanest copy I'd ever worked with ever with any other writer and I actually worked with a lot of writers so I will say you have something going on there about your first drafts that are uneditable. [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkxuzwCps70&t=3253s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkxuzwCps70&t=3253s
whoswho 3y ago
Does Neal Stephenson have an orb of seeing? I haven’t read any of his works or predictions but if he can tell the future then that’s worthy of a scientific study, I would posit. Wouldn’t be called predictions then, I suppose. Not sure if he’s the only one who wrote about possible future outcomes with the tropes listed in the article. But then they wouldn’t be called tropes either, I suppose.
samsartor 3y ago
I think the framing around these sorts of discussions always annoys me because few sci-fi books (and certainly no Neil Stephenson books) are primarily written as predictions. They are written as stories, with technology serving narrative above all else. Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an excuse to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase scenes. Fantastically fun in my opinion! But that motivates all kinds of choices (making the Internet a literal place with a street grid and real estate, where people can get chopped up by swords) that real XR tech has no particular technical use for. And I would implore any engineers using Snow Crash as an inspiration to consider how absurd it would be to take all the world's most sophisticated technology and dedicate it to gratifying personal power fantasies. It starts with the almost pornographic display of advanced weaponry and logistics deployed to deliver a pizza, and just gets more gloriously ridiculous from there. The main character is named "Hero Protagonist". The main antagonist has a nuke strapped to his motorcycle. Take a hint! Anyway, I am happy Diamond Age gets a call-out because it is by far my favorite of Stephenson's novels. And I think the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer is one of the all-time most interesting technological plot contrivances (the Imago machine, game/civilization of Azad, and Shrike all providing strong competition). But the technical constraints/capabilities of the Primer have almost nothing to do with realistic limitations/advantages of AI technology, and everything to do with getting the right characters into the right places at the right times. We need a Miranda to provide the Primer's voice so that Nell can have some kind of human connection in the end, and we need Miranda to be paid anonymously so that Nell won't get that human connection too soon. The Primer is a language model not a robot so that Nell will have to solve problems on her own. Yet she can learn Kung Fu from a language model because we need a few action scenes. I think really the interesting question posed is "Can a person grow up to be influential given no resources except a perfect education?" not so much "Can a language model provide a perfect education?". Many characters in Diamond Age seem to agree with the former notion, but in the end it (SPOILER) gets shot down when Nell needs control of an literal army to come out on top.
- cjohnson318 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm annoyed by writers equating "any computer that speaks like a real person" to "predicting ChatGPT". My four year old wanted a robot to clean up her LEGOs. Did she predict iRobot/Roomba? I would be more impressed by a scenario where, e.g., a writer predicts email, and then the side effects that (1) you have to have an email to create accounts for things, and (2) mail is constantly clogged by junk mail.
the__alchemist 3y ago
The Diamond age was my favorite Stephenson novel, but I'd like to highlight a personal favorite Neal Stephenson premonition, the extent of which is not fully realized, but seems likely. This one (circa 2019) is less ambitious, and less well-known: There are parts of Fall, or Dodge in Hell that describe a phenomenon called apes. These are bots, generally chatbots and similar. Commanded by state and non-state actor, they dominate the internet, and can be used to manipulate public opinion, or what people think they know in general. More generally, he discusses the creation of a post truth world, describing a brief period in history between the scientific revolution, and now, where people could agree on a cohesive world view. In the novel, the internet has now ended this; everyone is siloed into their own information bubbles, and can't agree on a common reality. Look up "MOAB" or "apes" in conjunction with this book for more information. I should note that these are some of the smaller ideas in that book...
- jpm_sd 3y ago
  The real-world parts of Fall were great, but the tedious simulation stuff ruined the book for me. As with all science fiction, his "predictions of the future" are actually sharp observations of current reality. He's not gazing into a crystal ball, he's just seeing the present from a different angle.
  - fullspectrumdev 3y ago
    Agree. I enjoyed it significantly less than his other works for the same reason. It was an interesting exploration of some ideas, but the “in simulation” arcs tended to have an absurdly slow pace, which may have been deliberate attempt to help show the passage of time between the “real world” parts.
  - FeloniousHam 3y ago
    I found the real-world parts a bore, and his re-creation of existence quite diverting. When I recommend the book, it's always with admonition to "skip the tedium, it goes on forever". Well, I did like "real world" parts that describe the practical basis for how the fantasy realm was manifest, but the life and times the present day characters was of no use to me. I didn't care a whit about the conspiracy theories, the post-US factions, any of that stuff.
karaterobot 3y ago
What's the stunning prediction talked about in the title? Because it sounds like he doesn't think he predicted today's AI, or that he thought about AI much in that story. > The technology that drives the book wasn’t really AI as we think of it now—I was talking to people who were working on some of the underlying technologies that would be needed to communicate on the internet in a secure, anonymous manner. I guess it’s implicit that there’s an AI in there that’s generating the story and increasing the degree of sophistication in response to the learning curve of the child, but I didn’t really go into that very much; I just kind of assumed it would be there.
paulpauper 3y ago
His books are so long he has written so many of them that the odds will approach 100% he coins some neologism
denton-scratch 3y ago
https://archive.ph/u75bw https://archive.ph/u75bw
davedunkin 3y ago
Who's writing sci-fi today that we will look back on as predictive?
- jes5199 3y ago
  no one. can't see past the event horizon.
lxgr 3y ago
I’m curious how his prediction about generative AI in Fall will play out. Mild spoilers ahead (not really plot relevant): He basically predicts that any form of leak intended to harm the subject depicted will become ineffective, since nobody will accept text, voice and video recordings as authentic anymore and people will actually perform “preemptive strikes” on the search space themselves, which will in turn be plausibly deniable for the same reason.
mewse-hn 3y ago
I find "Stephenson predicted ChatGPT!!" to be an incredibly stupid hot take, and I'm a fan of Stephenson.
nameless912 3y ago
I honestly think the Hyperion series does a better job predicting the enshittification of everything at the hands of AI than anything Stephenson wrote. And as an added bonus, it throws in some really interesting thought experiments about what a sentient AI would logically conclude the "right thing" to do with humanity was.
danans 3y ago
How do we know that it's a prediction rather than an influence on how things have turned out? After all, Stephenson has been a very popular author among those in the CS/AI/ML world for a long time. Furthermore, "conversations" with machines have been a model for human-AI interaction for a very long time. Stephenson didn't invent that idea.
InTheArena 3y ago
It's pretty interesting to re-read Baroque Cycle as well in the world of AI. In particular, the universal language based on math sure has some interesting thoughts that are applicable in the era of embeddings and AI. And if you can't get into it - pick up the audiobook version. It's fantastic
Sovann102 3y ago
[flagged]

149 points by Rant423 3y ago

flir 3y ago

This article's wrong. It's not the Illustrated Primer that presages the chatbots, it's the Librarian in Snow Crash. His "intelligence without consciousness" take is spookily accurate, I think.

kromem 3y ago
Not really. He multiple times goes out of his way to have the Librarian state that it cannot understand analogy. There's literally a paper on improved success at prompting by having a model create an analogous problem, solve that, and apply the approach to the original problem: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01714 https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01714

jpm_sd 3y ago

https://archive.is/mBH2q https://archive.is/mBH2q

suoduandao3 3y ago

The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book. I was intrigued to learn it's also one of the top recommended books by Tim Ferris guests. I wonder how many separate reasons there were for that.

histories 3y ago
"Kids need to get answers from humans who love them". https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_stephenson_author_geek_and_now_sword/c53o23x/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_st...
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  Thank you for sharing this! The Diamond Age was one of my favorite books and Neil's answer distilled and clarified a major theme of the book perfectly.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  God dammit I wish I had seen that a few months ago when there was a dozens-long HN thread where people were arguing that that wasn't what he meant or that it wasn't important to the success/failure of the different branches of that project in the book.
Karellen 3y ago
> The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book. Wait, did you mean The Diamond Age is an excellent book? Or... has someone made/written the book-within-the-book into an actual (e-?)book?
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  The full title of the book is The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
  - Karellen 3y ago
    Yeah, but if you're referring to a book, it's customary to refer to it by its main title, rather than just its subtitle. Especially when the subtitle is also the name of a different book, even if that book is a fictional book within the book. If I started talking about how great The Modern Prometheus is, people would generally either a) be very confused, or b) think I was a totally pretentious dickwad for not simply calling it Frankenstein.
    - suoduandao3 3y ago
      I guess that's a misunderstanding of protocols on my part, because the subtitle began with 'or', I assumed 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' was an alternate title and an alternate way to refer to it.
- sl-1 3y ago
  I think it is the subtext of the book: "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
- exe34 3y ago
  I kept thinking it should be possible to make something like it back in the day, and now with LLMs and deepfake, it's even closer to reality!
  - 3y ago
timmg 3y ago
Interestingly, I started reading it over xmas break -- based on a recommendation. I got, probably, a quarter of the way through it before I went back to work. And I haven't felt the urge to pick it up again. I was reading above comments about how liking NS is a matter of taste. So I'm not sure if I just "don't get it" or if maybe it's just "not my type of story." FWIW, so far, I just simply don't care about any of the characters. Just curious for those that like the novel: should I? Or is it more about the ruminations of technology that is important in this book?
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  Like a lot of nerdy scifi writers, NS's characters can come off a little... archetypal rather than complex or subtle. It's a lot more pronounced in his shorter works, as there's a lot more internal dialogue in his longer ones - if you find that a deal breaker, it's not confined to the start of the book. It might help to think of the characters as archetypal because he's writing about the future and these archetypes will be present in the future - the people who make history will seem a bit cartoonish because they'll be more extreme in their behaviour. And if that doesn't satisfy you might still like his longer books like Anathem - the characters were still recognizeable there, but there was a lot more humanity to their behaviour.
- pchristensen 3y ago
  I’ve read a couple NS books. I feel like the plots and characters are the dues to be paid in order to explore the SCI for concepts and worlds. Kind of like the stitching between action/chase scenes in a Fast and Furious movie. The plot is not the point.

batch12 3y ago

I'll probably get roasted for this, but- After reading all the love here for Stephenson here for years, I went and bought a few books (snow crash, diamond age, etc), intending to power through them. I am a pretty avid reader when I am in the mood and enjoy fiction including sci-fi, fantasy, *punk, etc. I couldn't get through Snow Crash. It didn't feel like a finished book to me. If I remember correctly it seemed like things like river names had placeholders and even saw some errors in the text. What am I missing?

imp0cat 3y ago
They are not for the faint of heart. :) But I personally found both Snow Crash and Diamond Age quite interesting.
devilbunny 3y ago
If you don’t like Snow Crash, you probably just won’t like Stephenson. If you don’t like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, you definitely shouldn’t bother with the rest of his works. You’ve tried him fairly; he’s just not for you.
- MarcScott 3y ago
  I didn't like either of them very much, but I've really enjoyed other books of his. - The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. - Seveneves - Cryptonomicon - Anathem - Reamde - Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (Although the metaworld parts in that get a little tiresome)
  - ElevenLathe 3y ago
    Yeah honestly he just keeps getting better IMO. Seveneves in particular gives me chills just thinking about -- so dark at points. Likewise, I think the Blue Ant books are Gibson's best work, though I have a strong attachment to Mona Lisa Overdrive just because of where I was in life when I first read it.
    - themadturk 3y ago

hprotagonist 3y ago

gargoyles -- never, ever, ever gonna be cool. Trust me.

ooterness 3y ago
But the Apple Gargoyle Pro is cool, right? It has an outward-facing display that shows your eyes.

asah 3y ago

Given the topic, I would disappointed if this article were written entirely by a human.

what-the-grump 3y ago
Its paywalled, so it right there with the topic and classism.

thunderbong 3y ago

https://archive.is/newest/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/02/chatbots-ai-neal-stephenson-diamond-age/677364/ https://archive.is/newest/https://www.theatlantic.com/techno...

eigenket 3y ago

I think the most prescient prediction he made about AI is this from Anathem. The concrete prediction is that the internet will become filled with AI written crap, and that anyone wanting to use it will have to filter out an enormous amount of AI nonsense, before they reach any useful information. To translate: reticulum means internet, syndevs means computers. > “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. > “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. > “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.” > “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone. > “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.” > “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.” > “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

BirAdam 3y ago
Anathem is my personal favorite of his for precisely this vision of near future history, and what the world does about it.
JohnDeHope 3y ago
Thanks for this quote. "Artificial Inanity" seems about as useful of a concept as "negative information" (from Foundation?) has been.

canistel 3y ago

Cryptocurrency too - in Cryptonomicon. Not exactly as it is used today, but along similar lines...

p_l 3y ago
Cryptocurrency was a hotly, if niche, debated topic in 1990s, which formed the backbone for Stephenson writing Cryptonomicon.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

I haven't finished the article yet and am currently reading it. But FWIW I'll just park this howler from the first paragraph here: > "prophesying what innovations are to come" No. Prophesy is the ability to see or correctly guess the future - a future that would have happened without the prophecy. Christopher Hitchens nailed it absolutely when he noted that science fiction is rarely prophetic, rather it's taken as a blueprint for post-facto design. It is self-fulfilling, influential fiction.

gitfan86 3y ago
It seems unlikely that there has ever been someone making a prediction, never telling anyone about the prediction and then living his life as if he never made the prediction. I predict that Donald Trump will claim election fraud in states he loses in 2024. Is that self fulfilling if it happens since I said it publicly?
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  There's some difference between an author like George Orwell writing a detailed novel which enters popular culture and sells millions of copies - and two blokes at the pub saying the royal family are lizards controlled by the saucer-people.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  > Is that self fulfilling if it happens since I said it publicly? No. It would be self-fulfilling if Donald Trump claimed election fraud specifically (as in, he's explicitly announcing it!) because gitfan86 said it would happen. If you look at something like the metaverse, a lot of the people trying to build a metaverse are explicitly citing stuff like Snow Crash as the motivation for what they're trying to build. That's what makes it self-fulfilling--the people trying to build the thing in the real world are using the fiction as a blueprint.

deleted 3y ago

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imgabe 3y ago

It’s worth noting that in the book the “AI” is partly a live connection to a human being.

tempaway74641 3y ago

I dont get whats supposed to be prescient about writing a book with an AI in it, in 1995. And nearly three decades before the release of ChatGPT, he presaged the current AI revolution. This claim seems to hinge on on the Primer in the Diamond Age which uses an actor to read out its text, which is taken as a metaphor for ChatGPT being built on human output. I mean, the Primer/Ractor combo seems like a cool thing to have in a book, but I don't see why this is a 'most stunning prediction'

dumbmrblah 3y ago

https://archive.is/mBH2q https://archive.is/mBH2q

williamcotton 3y ago

Gibson > Stephenson Whenever I think I am remembering Snow Crash, I’m actually thinking of characters and plot lines from Neuromancer!

Cheer2171 3y ago
That is because Stephenson is intentionally parodying Gibson.
- Krasnol 3y ago
  ...and didn't bother much describing the world his story takes place in because he expected you to know Gibson's Cyberpunk already.

gilbetron 3y ago

I've been a fan of his since Snowcrash came out, and was hoping the article would be interesting, but instead it reads like someone that has consumed too many of his own press releases. Starting off with, "It’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate," was really disappointing.

koryk 3y ago

Gen AI and its potential impact has been covered by Stephenson multiple times. I wrote a short post on some of the references in Anathem. It's also a large plot point in Fall or Dodge in Hell. One of the characters open sources some generative ai to fill the internet with slightly untrue spam. https://medium.com/@k0ryk/neal-stephensons-llm-predictions-7fbb3b39607 https://medium.com/@k0ryk/neal-stephensons-llm-predictions-7...

SkyMarshal 3y ago

I would argue an equally prescient prediction of his is from Snowcrash, the use of sophisticated disinformation and psyops to mass-reprogram the human race, and the innate immunity or resistance to it that some people have. That vision of the future is now playing out in realtime.

queuebert 3y ago

Just out of curiosity, do pieces like these get written because a journalist is randomly interested in the idea, or does the author's publisher reach out to the magazine and suggest a puff piece topic?

simonw 3y ago
Very much both. Plenty of pieces like this are PR-driven, but quality publications are always looking to write interesting pieces independently of PR pitches. Many pieces come about because an individual journalist pitches an idea to their editor.

Kaibeezy 3y ago

From my perspective, Stephenson appears to have been engineered to meet my optimal reading specification. This improbability makes it among the best evidence I have that I am living in a simulation, along with the sound of Wayne Rogers (guitarist, not actor), the flavor of fresh doogh, the A944 west of Alford, several others.

EdwardCoffin 3y ago

Talking about Neal Stephenson's works always brings up several topics: endings and editing. He's responded to criticisms of his endings in various book talks, for instance his Author's at Google talk about Anathem [1] (prepositioned to the relevant bit @10:54). One of his editor's at Wired magazine also made a comment about editing his work in his book talk about Fall or Dodge in Hell at the Interval [2]. This is a transcript of a part of the Authors at Google talk for Anathem (first link prepositioned to 10:54): [10:54] Q: How do you think about ending your stories? They seem to run the gamut from some where the action just ends, and others where there's the equivalent of a movie ending with a ten-minute car chase in it. [11:11] A: Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently. [11:21] But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things. I've seen people complain, for example, that Snow Crash doesn't have a good ending. But I can remember that at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby Dick. There's a helicopter that gets brought down, and there's a private jet that blows up, some people die, there's confrontations, and the girl goes home with her mom, it seems like a good ending to me. So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is. [12:59] For The Baroque Cycle, I created a kind of NORAD bunker in which to write the ending. It was this complete, you know, the wall, the ceiling, the floor, they were completely covered with timelines, charts, and all kinds of technology that I was using to bring all the plot lines together into an end. [13:27] I think Anathem does ok on that score. I'm sure I'll be hearing from some of the Stephenson can't write endings people, but I think it's got a decent enough ending on this one. This is a transcript of an unknown (to me) Wired editor talking about Stephenson's copy: I will tell you I was working under Kevin at Wired when Neil did a story of following the fiberoptic cable around the world, and it was a forty five thousand word piece, and I will say when you brought the copy in I could not improve it as an editor. It was the cleanest copy I'd ever worked with ever with any other writer and I actually worked with a lot of writers so I will say you have something going on there about your first drafts that are uneditable. [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=10m54s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkxuzwCps70&t=3253s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkxuzwCps70&t=3253s

whoswho 3y ago

Does Neal Stephenson have an orb of seeing? I haven’t read any of his works or predictions but if he can tell the future then that’s worthy of a scientific study, I would posit. Wouldn’t be called predictions then, I suppose. Not sure if he’s the only one who wrote about possible future outcomes with the tropes listed in the article. But then they wouldn’t be called tropes either, I suppose.

samsartor 3y ago

I think the framing around these sorts of discussions always annoys me because few sci-fi books (and certainly no Neil Stephenson books) are primarily written as predictions. They are written as stories, with technology serving narrative above all else. Snow Crash in particular uses the metaverse mostly as an excuse to include sword fights and motorcycle/monorail chase scenes. Fantastically fun in my opinion! But that motivates all kinds of choices (making the Internet a literal place with a street grid and real estate, where people can get chopped up by swords) that real XR tech has no particular technical use for. And I would implore any engineers using Snow Crash as an inspiration to consider how absurd it would be to take all the world's most sophisticated technology and dedicate it to gratifying personal power fantasies. It starts with the almost pornographic display of advanced weaponry and logistics deployed to deliver a pizza, and just gets more gloriously ridiculous from there. The main character is named "Hero Protagonist". The main antagonist has a nuke strapped to his motorcycle. Take a hint! Anyway, I am happy Diamond Age gets a call-out because it is by far my favorite of Stephenson's novels. And I think the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer is one of the all-time most interesting technological plot contrivances (the Imago machine, game/civilization of Azad, and Shrike all providing strong competition). But the technical constraints/capabilities of the Primer have almost nothing to do with realistic limitations/advantages of AI technology, and everything to do with getting the right characters into the right places at the right times. We need a Miranda to provide the Primer's voice so that Nell can have some kind of human connection in the end, and we need Miranda to be paid anonymously so that Nell won't get that human connection too soon. The Primer is a language model not a robot so that Nell will have to solve problems on her own. Yet she can learn Kung Fu from a language model because we need a few action scenes. I think really the interesting question posed is "Can a person grow up to be influential given no resources except a perfect education?" not so much "Can a language model provide a perfect education?". Many characters in Diamond Age seem to agree with the former notion, but in the end it (SPOILER) gets shot down when Nell needs control of an literal army to come out on top.

cjohnson318 3y ago
Yeah, I'm annoyed by writers equating "any computer that speaks like a real person" to "predicting ChatGPT". My four year old wanted a robot to clean up her LEGOs. Did she predict iRobot/Roomba? I would be more impressed by a scenario where, e.g., a writer predicts email, and then the side effects that (1) you have to have an email to create accounts for things, and (2) mail is constantly clogged by junk mail.

the__alchemist 3y ago

The Diamond age was my favorite Stephenson novel, but I'd like to highlight a personal favorite Neal Stephenson premonition, the extent of which is not fully realized, but seems likely. This one (circa 2019) is less ambitious, and less well-known: There are parts of Fall, or Dodge in Hell that describe a phenomenon called apes. These are bots, generally chatbots and similar. Commanded by state and non-state actor, they dominate the internet, and can be used to manipulate public opinion, or what people think they know in general. More generally, he discusses the creation of a post truth world, describing a brief period in history between the scientific revolution, and now, where people could agree on a cohesive world view. In the novel, the internet has now ended this; everyone is siloed into their own information bubbles, and can't agree on a common reality. Look up "MOAB" or "apes" in conjunction with this book for more information. I should note that these are some of the smaller ideas in that book...

jpm_sd 3y ago
The real-world parts of Fall were great, but the tedious simulation stuff ruined the book for me. As with all science fiction, his "predictions of the future" are actually sharp observations of current reality. He's not gazing into a crystal ball, he's just seeing the present from a different angle.
- fullspectrumdev 3y ago
  Agree. I enjoyed it significantly less than his other works for the same reason. It was an interesting exploration of some ideas, but the “in simulation” arcs tended to have an absurdly slow pace, which may have been deliberate attempt to help show the passage of time between the “real world” parts.
- FeloniousHam 3y ago
  I found the real-world parts a bore, and his re-creation of existence quite diverting. When I recommend the book, it's always with admonition to "skip the tedium, it goes on forever". Well, I did like "real world" parts that describe the practical basis for how the fantasy realm was manifest, but the life and times the present day characters was of no use to me. I didn't care a whit about the conspiracy theories, the post-US factions, any of that stuff.

karaterobot 3y ago

What's the stunning prediction talked about in the title? Because it sounds like he doesn't think he predicted today's AI, or that he thought about AI much in that story. > The technology that drives the book wasn’t really AI as we think of it now—I was talking to people who were working on some of the underlying technologies that would be needed to communicate on the internet in a secure, anonymous manner. I guess it’s implicit that there’s an AI in there that’s generating the story and increasing the degree of sophistication in response to the learning curve of the child, but I didn’t really go into that very much; I just kind of assumed it would be there.

paulpauper 3y ago

His books are so long he has written so many of them that the odds will approach 100% he coins some neologism

denton-scratch 3y ago

https://archive.ph/u75bw https://archive.ph/u75bw

davedunkin 3y ago

Who's writing sci-fi today that we will look back on as predictive?

jes5199 3y ago
no one. can't see past the event horizon.

lxgr 3y ago

I’m curious how his prediction about generative AI in Fall will play out. Mild spoilers ahead (not really plot relevant): He basically predicts that any form of leak intended to harm the subject depicted will become ineffective, since nobody will accept text, voice and video recordings as authentic anymore and people will actually perform “preemptive strikes” on the search space themselves, which will in turn be plausibly deniable for the same reason.

mewse-hn 3y ago

I find "Stephenson predicted ChatGPT!!" to be an incredibly stupid hot take, and I'm a fan of Stephenson.

nameless912 3y ago

I honestly think the Hyperion series does a better job predicting the enshittification of everything at the hands of AI than anything Stephenson wrote. And as an added bonus, it throws in some really interesting thought experiments about what a sentient AI would logically conclude the "right thing" to do with humanity was.

danans 3y ago

How do we know that it's a prediction rather than an influence on how things have turned out? After all, Stephenson has been a very popular author among those in the CS/AI/ML world for a long time. Furthermore, "conversations" with machines have been a model for human-AI interaction for a very long time. Stephenson didn't invent that idea.

InTheArena 3y ago

It's pretty interesting to re-read Baroque Cycle as well in the world of AI. In particular, the universal language based on math sure has some interesting thoughts that are applicable in the era of embeddings and AI. And if you can't get into it - pick up the audiobook version. It's fantastic

Sovann102 3y ago

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