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There's also Frank Herbert. Who saw AI as ruinous to humanity and it's evolution and saw a future where humanity had to fight a war against it resulting in it
by timewizard 1y ago
There's also Frank Herbert. Who saw AI as ruinous to humanity and it's evolution and saw a future where humanity had to fight a war against it resulting in it being banished from the entire universe.
- palmotea 1y ago> There's also Frank Herbert. Who saw AI as ruinous to humanity and it's evolution and saw a future where humanity had to fight a war against it resulting in it being banished from the entire universe. Did he though? Or was the Butlerian Jihad backstory whose function was allow him to believably center human characters in his stories, given sci-fi expectations of the time? I like Herbert's work, but ultimately he (and Asimov) were producers of stories to entertain people, so entertainment always would take priority over truth (and then there's the entirely different problem of accurately predicting the future).
- tehjoker 1y agoI think this is kind of misunderstanding scifi a bit. You're right it was designed to be entertaining, but the kernel of it is that they take some existing trend and extrapolate it into the future. Do that enough times, and some of the stories will start to be meaningful looking backwards and the people who made those predictions still deserve credit even if they weren't entirely useful in the forward direction.
- triceratops 1y agoI always thought the Butlerian Jihad was a convenient way to remove AI as a plot element. Same thing with shields and explosions; it made swordfighting a plausible way to fight in a universe with faster-than-light travel.