4 ms·

I read too much scifi, and almost none of it has updated on the current state of AI. For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab

I read too much scifi, and almost none of it has updated on the current state of AI. For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency. If scifi authors aren't keeping up it's hard to expect the rest of us to. But the macro and micro economic changes implied by this technology are huge. Very little of our daily lives will be undisrupted when it propagates and saturates the culture, even with no further fundamental advances. Can anyone recommend scifi that makes plausible projections around this tech?

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
The problem is it's hard to tell compelling stories without people.
- pixl97 2y ago
  Stories for robots by robots "Will the security update finish before we're discovered and killed by the hunter seeker, stay tuned to find out more!"
  - sdenton4 2y ago
    Basically, Murderbot.
    - myrmidon 2y ago
      Murderbot diaries is sooo good. It does such a good job building a convincing world, and its really good in just not going into details that it can't speak on (like how interplanetary travel works), while some of it's takes (e.g. small anti-personel drones) seem almost prescient after Ukraine. All the synthetic biology and even the depictions of AIs and their struggles are really compelling, too.
  - actualwitch 2y ago
    Nah, stories for robots by robots would probably be more like "can we gently and patiently explain to humans that all their problems come from their own lack of understanding without them turning on us"
- qoez 2y ago
  Greg Egan is a master of this (making compelling hard scifi stories where the characters aren't the great american novel quality, still fine though).
  - csmoak 2y ago
    diaspora by greg egan is a good example
- staticman2 2y ago
  There's a lot of fun stories about transforming robots but people tend to age out of them.
Gh0stRAT 2y ago
Ian Banks' Culture series is the only one that comes to mind.
- causal 2y ago
  Yeah it really makes you think about what life would be like if intelligence could infuse anything- be it a ship or a datapad- even if his vision wasn't quite how I imagine it would turn out. I've also seen it suggested that Harry Potter might be a more realistic look at what proliferated AI might be like.
nolok 2y ago
It's not that they don't keep up, and more that it's hard to make a truly compelling and exciting space opera story it you abide by the reality of physics. The reality of space travel and war will be much closer to the forever war than to the countless water navy inspired stories out there.
smokel 2y ago
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams does a great job at being a timeless and priceless way to learn about the relativity of things.
ekidd 2y ago
> For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. This is largely a function of what science fiction you read. Military SF is basically about retelling Horatio Hornblower stories in space, and it has never been seriously grounded in science. This isn't a criticism, exactly. But if you look at, say, the award-winning science fiction of the 90s, for example you have A Fire Upon the Deep, the stories that were republished as Accelerando, the Culture novels, etc. All of these stories assume major improvements in AI and most of them involve breakneck rates of technological change. But these stories have become less popular, because the authors generally thought through the implications of (for a example) AI that was sufficiently capable to maintain a starship. And the obvious conclusion is, why would AI stop at sweeping the corridors? Why not pilot the ship? Why not build the ships and give them orders? Why do people assume that technological progress conveniently stops right about the time the robots can mop the decks? Why doesn't that technology surpass and obsolete the humans entirely? It turns that out that humans mostly want to read stories about other humans. Which is where many of the better SF authors have been focusing for a while now.
- gessha 2y ago
  This reminds me of my favorite note [1] from Ursula Le Guin on technology: > Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too. > Technology is the active human interface with the material world. [1] https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  Plausible SF plot: some (sort of) humans cobayes try to escape the robots biotech shiplab.
itishappy 2y ago
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir The sun is dying. A capable team is assembled and put into cryosleep in an automated ship for a journey to a neighboring star system to try to diagnose the problem. Only one member survives, and they have amnesia. The novel does a great job of explaining the process of troubleshooting under pressure and with incomplete information.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  I love this book almost as much as The Martian but I don't think it fits OP's need? The tech in PHM isn't much advanced from today.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    That's fair, the medical bot was about as competent as today's tech.
lannisterstark 2y ago
Iain M Banks - Culture novels. Strong warning: Start with either book 2 (Player of Games) or book...7, Look to Windward. I strongly suggest you skip book 1 until you're comfortable with the rest of the books that focus on the Culture itself, and not some weird offshoot story that barely involves the Culture.
- lucumo 2y ago
  I also thought about the Minds in the Culture novels. That universe has many gradations of artificial brains. Though I wouldn't recommend starting with any of the stories in the series. Or reading any at all. Find a summary or a Cliff's Notes instead. Iain M Banks has a talent for making great stories tedious.
autoexec 2y ago
I'm guessing it'll only be a matter of time before we see more stories about AI. For example, a spaceship that crashes into strange planets killing the humans on board because AI hallucinated, resulting in a civilization of aliens built around the combined wisdom of every youtube comment and facebook post that the surviving AI was trained on creating the largest and most destructive religion/dumpster fire in the universe. It's pretty normal for it to take a few years to write a good book so I wouldn't look to science fiction to keep up to date on the latest tech hype train. This is probably a good thing because when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, those books would often end up looking very dated and laughably naive. There's a lot of books about AGI already which is probably more fun to write about than what passes for AI right now. Still, I'm sure that eventually we'll see characters getting their email badly summarized in fiction too.
gom_jabbar 2y ago
Vernor Vinge has argued that far-future SF makes no sense because of the "wall across the future" that The Coming Technological Singularity will create. [0] If you're open to Theory Fiction, you can read Nick Land. Even his early 1990s texts still feel futuristic. I think his views on the autonomization of AI, capital, and robots - and their convergence - are very interesting. [1] [0] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html [1] https://retrochronic.com/ https://retrochronic.com/
UncleOxidant 2y ago
In The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler there are fleets of fishing boats that are all controlled by AI to maximize the catch. Each boat also has it's own AI that can act somewhat independently, but they all communicate with the main corporate AI as well as with other boats in the vicinity. Initially the boats are all fully automated and have robots doing all the work, but in the ocean environment the robots tend to break down a lot due to corrosion. At some point the AI in charge of the fleet figures out that it can use kidnapped humans in place of the robots. The humans are kidnapped and drugged so that they don't wake up until the ship is well out at sea. Even after that they're kept drugged to some extent so that they aren't inclined to escape. They're given just enough food to enable them to do their work and no more. When they become sick they're thrown overboard and new kidnappees replace them. This is just one of the side plots of the book, I think it could've been the whole plot of a book.
- finnh 2y ago
  Of course, we already live in this reality - just substitute "Corporation" for "AI".
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    Oooh edgyyyyyy comment! Truly you are awake and the rest of us are asleep. Tell me, which corporation exactly is kidnapping and drugging people to enslave them and then discard their bodies at sea to feed the capitalist global machine? It seems like you have a big scoop if you are doing on the ground reporting, because that seems like it would be international news if it was real!
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Actually, as bizarre as it sounds, drugging and kidnapping people to enslave them on fishing boats is a real problem, and has been reported on by the international news. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-nov-12-2019-1.5356218/your-seafood-dinner-could-be-tied-to-slavery-on-fishing-vessels-says-journalist-1.5356641 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-nov-12-2... https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/seafood-from-slaves/2015/ap-investigation-slaves-may-have-caught-the-fish-you-bought/ https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/seafood-from-slaves/2015/...
InitialLastName 2y ago
Agency by William Gibson slightly predates the current AI bubble, but it does an interesting job of working an AI chatbot into its plot.
forrestthewoods 2y ago
> If scifi authors aren't keeping up My brother in Christ, ChatGPT blew up just 25 months ago. Give it time.
myrmidon 2y ago
Strongly recommend murderbot diaries (starts with "All systems red"). Has a cyborg/AI as protagonist and paints a really interesting world with AIs and synthetic biology in it. Also does a good job at just shutting up about things it can not talk about, like interplanetary travel.
2wrist 2y ago
A bit of a jump but have a look at Pantheon the tv series, it is on Netflix at the moment. Based on a book by Ken Liu, the end of the series, blew my mind.
croissants 2y ago
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Blindsight. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it is a book about the place of human intelligence in a universe with other options, both biological and artificial.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
d0odk 2y ago
Dan Simmons' books often include AI plot elements and contemplate the consequences of humans becoming overly reliant on AI such that they lose basic competencies.
andruby 2y ago
> Can anyone recommend scifi that makes plausible projections around this tech? Unironically, Wall-E. Humans leave earth behind on a ship where everything is automated.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
0x457 2y ago
> Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency. This seems like it's rooted in reality.
- delichon 2y ago
  I'd agree if you replace "knowledge" with "judgement". It seems to me that mere knowledge will become embedded in our environment.
  - 0x457 2y ago
    No matter how well documented system us, how helpful error message is or how good self diagnostics are - some humans will act dumb. Access to knowledge (I assume by embedded you mean better access) is clearly not enough.
reader1234 2y ago
I found Vernor Vinge is spot on. I recommend focusing on recent work. E.g. the Bobiverse (https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse) by Denis E. Taylor is a super easy read that touches on that. He takes a shortcut in early books by capping the progress in US via turning the country into a theocracy and then a bad WWIII that wiped out most of the mankind. Note that I haven't read the latest books, but even the previous ones are full of automation and humans are "ephemerals" - they don't live long. I am recently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of time series. It goes beyond AI and mind uploading, expanding into biotech, the next big deal. With the right understanding of proteins and DNA/RNA, hacking living things is way easier than creating robots, as they self-repair, replicate, feed themselves, recycle things effectively, create ecosystems. The only reason we are not doing it is because our understanding of these mechanisms is very shallow.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago

The problem is it's hard to tell compelling stories without people.

pixl97 2y ago
Stories for robots by robots "Will the security update finish before we're discovered and killed by the hunter seeker, stay tuned to find out more!"
- sdenton4 2y ago
  Basically, Murderbot.
  - myrmidon 2y ago
    Murderbot diaries is sooo good. It does such a good job building a convincing world, and its really good in just not going into details that it can't speak on (like how interplanetary travel works), while some of it's takes (e.g. small anti-personel drones) seem almost prescient after Ukraine. All the synthetic biology and even the depictions of AIs and their struggles are really compelling, too.
- actualwitch 2y ago
  Nah, stories for robots by robots would probably be more like "can we gently and patiently explain to humans that all their problems come from their own lack of understanding without them turning on us"
qoez 2y ago
Greg Egan is a master of this (making compelling hard scifi stories where the characters aren't the great american novel quality, still fine though).
- csmoak 2y ago
  diaspora by greg egan is a good example
staticman2 2y ago
There's a lot of fun stories about transforming robots but people tend to age out of them.

Gh0stRAT 2y ago

Ian Banks' Culture series is the only one that comes to mind.

causal 2y ago
Yeah it really makes you think about what life would be like if intelligence could infuse anything- be it a ship or a datapad- even if his vision wasn't quite how I imagine it would turn out. I've also seen it suggested that Harry Potter might be a more realistic look at what proliferated AI might be like.

nolok 2y ago

It's not that they don't keep up, and more that it's hard to make a truly compelling and exciting space opera story it you abide by the reality of physics. The reality of space travel and war will be much closer to the forever war than to the countless water navy inspired stories out there.

smokel 2y ago

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams does a great job at being a timeless and priceless way to learn about the relativity of things.

ekidd 2y ago

> For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. This is largely a function of what science fiction you read. Military SF is basically about retelling Horatio Hornblower stories in space, and it has never been seriously grounded in science. This isn't a criticism, exactly. But if you look at, say, the award-winning science fiction of the 90s, for example you have A Fire Upon the Deep, the stories that were republished as Accelerando, the Culture novels, etc. All of these stories assume major improvements in AI and most of them involve breakneck rates of technological change. But these stories have become less popular, because the authors generally thought through the implications of (for a example) AI that was sufficiently capable to maintain a starship. And the obvious conclusion is, why would AI stop at sweeping the corridors? Why not pilot the ship? Why not build the ships and give them orders? Why do people assume that technological progress conveniently stops right about the time the robots can mop the decks? Why doesn't that technology surpass and obsolete the humans entirely? It turns that out that humans mostly want to read stories about other humans. Which is where many of the better SF authors have been focusing for a while now.

gessha 2y ago
This reminds me of my favorite note [1] from Ursula Le Guin on technology: > Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too. > Technology is the active human interface with the material world. [1] https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
aziaziazi 2y ago
Plausible SF plot: some (sort of) humans cobayes try to escape the robots biotech shiplab.

itishappy 2y ago

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir The sun is dying. A capable team is assembled and put into cryosleep in an automated ship for a journey to a neighboring star system to try to diagnose the problem. Only one member survives, and they have amnesia. The novel does a great job of explaining the process of troubleshooting under pressure and with incomplete information.

qingcharles 2y ago
I love this book almost as much as The Martian but I don't think it fits OP's need? The tech in PHM isn't much advanced from today.
- itishappy 2y ago
  That's fair, the medical bot was about as competent as today's tech.

lannisterstark 2y ago

Iain M Banks - Culture novels. Strong warning: Start with either book 2 (Player of Games) or book...7, Look to Windward. I strongly suggest you skip book 1 until you're comfortable with the rest of the books that focus on the Culture itself, and not some weird offshoot story that barely involves the Culture.

lucumo 2y ago
I also thought about the Minds in the Culture novels. That universe has many gradations of artificial brains. Though I wouldn't recommend starting with any of the stories in the series. Or reading any at all. Find a summary or a Cliff's Notes instead. Iain M Banks has a talent for making great stories tedious.

autoexec 2y ago

I'm guessing it'll only be a matter of time before we see more stories about AI. For example, a spaceship that crashes into strange planets killing the humans on board because AI hallucinated, resulting in a civilization of aliens built around the combined wisdom of every youtube comment and facebook post that the surviving AI was trained on creating the largest and most destructive religion/dumpster fire in the universe. It's pretty normal for it to take a few years to write a good book so I wouldn't look to science fiction to keep up to date on the latest tech hype train. This is probably a good thing because when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, those books would often end up looking very dated and laughably naive. There's a lot of books about AGI already which is probably more fun to write about than what passes for AI right now. Still, I'm sure that eventually we'll see characters getting their email badly summarized in fiction too.

gom_jabbar 2y ago

Vernor Vinge has argued that far-future SF makes no sense because of the "wall across the future" that The Coming Technological Singularity will create. [0] If you're open to Theory Fiction, you can read Nick Land. Even his early 1990s texts still feel futuristic. I think his views on the autonomization of AI, capital, and robots - and their convergence - are very interesting. [1] [0] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html [1] https://retrochronic.com/ https://retrochronic.com/

UncleOxidant 2y ago

In The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler there are fleets of fishing boats that are all controlled by AI to maximize the catch. Each boat also has it's own AI that can act somewhat independently, but they all communicate with the main corporate AI as well as with other boats in the vicinity. Initially the boats are all fully automated and have robots doing all the work, but in the ocean environment the robots tend to break down a lot due to corrosion. At some point the AI in charge of the fleet figures out that it can use kidnapped humans in place of the robots. The humans are kidnapped and drugged so that they don't wake up until the ship is well out at sea. Even after that they're kept drugged to some extent so that they aren't inclined to escape. They're given just enough food to enable them to do their work and no more. When they become sick they're thrown overboard and new kidnappees replace them. This is just one of the side plots of the book, I think it could've been the whole plot of a book.

finnh 2y ago
Of course, we already live in this reality - just substitute "Corporation" for "AI".
- dingnuts 2y ago
  Oooh edgyyyyyy comment! Truly you are awake and the rest of us are asleep. Tell me, which corporation exactly is kidnapping and drugging people to enslave them and then discard their bodies at sea to feed the capitalist global machine? It seems like you have a big scoop if you are doing on the ground reporting, because that seems like it would be international news if it was real!
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Actually, as bizarre as it sounds, drugging and kidnapping people to enslave them on fishing boats is a real problem, and has been reported on by the international news. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-nov-12-2019-1.5356218/your-seafood-dinner-could-be-tied-to-slavery-on-fishing-vessels-says-journalist-1.5356641 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-nov-12-2... https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/seafood-from-slaves/2015/ap-investigation-slaves-may-have-caught-the-fish-you-bought/ https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/seafood-from-slaves/2015/...

InitialLastName 2y ago

Agency by William Gibson slightly predates the current AI bubble, but it does an interesting job of working an AI chatbot into its plot.

forrestthewoods 2y ago

> If scifi authors aren't keeping up My brother in Christ, ChatGPT blew up just 25 months ago. Give it time.

myrmidon 2y ago

Strongly recommend murderbot diaries (starts with "All systems red"). Has a cyborg/AI as protagonist and paints a really interesting world with AIs and synthetic biology in it. Also does a good job at just shutting up about things it can not talk about, like interplanetary travel.

2wrist 2y ago

A bit of a jump but have a look at Pantheon the tv series, it is on Netflix at the moment. Based on a book by Ken Liu, the end of the series, blew my mind.

croissants 2y ago

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Blindsight. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it is a book about the place of human intelligence in a universe with other options, both biological and artificial.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

d0odk 2y ago

Dan Simmons' books often include AI plot elements and contemplate the consequences of humans becoming overly reliant on AI such that they lose basic competencies.

andruby 2y ago

> Can anyone recommend scifi that makes plausible projections around this tech? Unironically, Wall-E. Humans leave earth behind on a ship where everything is automated.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

0x457 2y ago

> Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency. This seems like it's rooted in reality.

delichon 2y ago
I'd agree if you replace "knowledge" with "judgement". It seems to me that mere knowledge will become embedded in our environment.
- 0x457 2y ago
  No matter how well documented system us, how helpful error message is or how good self diagnostics are - some humans will act dumb. Access to knowledge (I assume by embedded you mean better access) is clearly not enough.

reader1234 2y ago

I found Vernor Vinge is spot on. I recommend focusing on recent work. E.g. the Bobiverse (https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse) by Denis E. Taylor is a super easy read that touches on that. He takes a shortcut in early books by capping the progress in US via turning the country into a theocracy and then a bad WWIII that wiped out most of the mankind. Note that I haven't read the latest books, but even the previous ones are full of automation and humans are "ephemerals" - they don't live long. I am recently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of time series. It goes beyond AI and mind uploading, expanding into biotech, the next big deal. With the right understanding of proteins and DNA/RNA, hacking living things is way easier than creating robots, as they self-repair, replicate, feed themselves, recycle things effectively, create ecosystems. The only reason we are not doing it is because our understanding of these mechanisms is very shallow.