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Arthur C. Clarke predicted a computer-dominated future in the ’70s (2024)
- rcarmo 1y agoObligatory “Open the pod bay doors, HAL” quote.
- timmg 1y agoTangentially related: I recently read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (by Heinlein). It was a fantastic read (IMHO). And it has extra relevance right now with the AI/LLM progress we are seeing.
- stevenwoo 1y agoIt’s vague enough in details to still be plausible in one’s interpretation. I think the only dated tech thing is he talks about tapes a bit. And that one death hits surprisingly hard and it’s quite forward thinking though Asimov had similar stuff in his Robots series.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 1y agoExcellent book, one of my favorites of his.
- mystified5016 1y agoThis is a story that all nerds should read. Heinlein was shockingly thorough and accurate with his depictions of the computer systems in play. I've always thought the build-up to the final battle was incredibly detailed and exactly how I would solve those problems today. The book was written in 1966, and I think it really holds up to modern technical scrutiny, except for a few very specific and very obsolete technologies. Honestly I just love this story. It has all the charm of a quaint midcentury story, but is still technically competent and compelling to a modern reader. I don't think any of his other stories pull this off quite so well. Mike is a major plot point in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. He never actually appears though. Not sure I'd recommend that book honestly. He went real heavy on inserting his personal politics, to the point of standing up strawman characters just to give the main character a communist to berate and harass. It really ruined the experience for me. I have just now learned that there's a sequel to The Cat, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. The Wikipedia summary sounds.... really bad, but Mike has at least a few lines so I guess I'll go read it now.
- ednite 1y agoDon’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Clarke. In fact, I’m kind of obsessed with a lot of sci-fi writers. I just wanted to point out that Star Trek did the rogue AI thing a year earlier, the 1967 episode with Nomad was basically “kill all unworthy lifeforms.” Probably rooted in post-war anxieties, maybe even echoes of the Holocaust. But nevertheless, an AI bent on a mission, unable to question its original directive. Then came HAL 9000 in 1968 , cold, calculating, and quietly terrifying. Still creeps me out! But credit where it’s due , Asimov laid the groundwork for ethical AI way back in the 1940s with his Three Laws. That’s hard to beat. Different styles, different fears, but all compelling visions of futures we’re creeping toward or not. I'm rooting for the latter.
- wdbm 1y agoHey, let's not forget 1927's Metropolis, where an authoritarian government uses deepfaked bots to manipulate the population.
- ednite 1y agoTrue. Classic that really goes way back.
- shawn_w 1y agoRobert Sheckley's 1953 story Watchbird[0] is about a networked AI drone system intended to prevent murders that gets out of hand when it slowly starts expanding the scope of its original mission - by the end they're preventing surgeries because scalpels do technically hurt the patient. The "solution" humans come up with shows they learned absolutely nothing from the experience. I doubt that was the first such story. [0]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29579/29579-h/29579-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29579/29579-h/29579-h.htm
- ednite 1y agoWatchbird sounds like one firmware update away from becoming DJI SmartSurgeon. Kidding aside, adding this to my reading list. Thanks for the link.
- dhosek 1y agoThere was a short story I read back in the early 80s (although it was much older), which predicted LLMs—albeit rather oddly. The system had a chimpanzee connected to a computer (the chimp being the magic sauce to make the AI work). You could give it the beginning of a text and it would create the ideal ending. An author was using it to argue with his editor about a scene break and they used the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy (“to be or not to be…” to demonstrate the system before giving it the author’s story to see what it did. I’ve thought about this story a lot lately, and would love to turn it up again.
- NoboruWataya 1y agoI couldn't resist and asked ChatGPT what your story is. The Monkey's Finger by Asimov?
- tokamak 1y agoStenislaw Lem, Dialogues, 1957
- detourdog 1y agoI thought the story posted here a couple of weeks back also predicted AI and was written in 1905. The machine stops https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/short-fiction/text/the-machine-stops https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/short-fiction/...
- tiahura 1y agoUm, Samuel Butler in 1863 Darwin in the Machines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines
- detourdog 1y agoSounds good to me. I believe it goes back even further. Human technical aspirations I believe go all the way back.
- anonymousiam 1y agoRecently, I re-read Clarke's 2001 series (all four books). The books don't have perfect continuity, and he discusses this in his prologues. In the series, the "monolith" changed from being a tool of an early, lonely, space-faring race, to an autonomous thinking machine, acting independently.
- djmips 1y agoI prefer the original because of Kubrick's influence.
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago[dead]
- southernplaces7 1y agoPredicting this in the 70s? No big deal. It wasn't hard to foresee by then if you're anyone with modest knowledge of technology. If he'd predicted it in the 50's or earlier, then I'd be damn impressed, steadily more the further back the years go from there.
- djmips 1y agoA modest knowledge of technology in the 70s did not embue the vision outlined by Clarke, I give him a bit more credit. I'm sure most people from that era would be astounded by where we are today.
- mystified5016 1y agoI mean, someone from the 70s would definitely be surprised by the specific technologies we have (and don't have). I don't think they'd be surprised to learn that every person has a personal computer (of some type) or that technology has become so ingrained into our culture. It was pretty clear back then that computing and electronics were on a very fast trajectory to more or less where we ended up. I only did a cursory search, but seems like by 1970, IBM was worth nearly a billion dollars. It was a pretty safe bet.
- djmips 1y agoIt feels like you are young.
- rf15 1y agoWe should really stop calling it a "prediction" if past fiction coincides with our current state of affairs
- maxglute 1y ago1 million years from now, some ball of sentient energy will read their existence was predicted in some 20th century scifi. Only mildly joking, I imagine many indistinguishable from magic ideas has been scribbled down since since scribing/writing become popular.
- nickdothutton 1y agoSci-fi predicts many possible futures. It is our job to make one happen.
- Hotdogsteve 1y agoWhen you dig into what people in the computer science world of the '60s-'80s were thinking about the future of computers, especially as parts became more and more miniaturized, what you find is a lot of them had a pretty strong grasp of where things were heading. Prediction is a tricky thing to give credit for after the fact, obviously, and it's near impossible to tell who is giving their honest forecast vs. who is cribbing some sci-fi plot point (to say nothing of how we interpret predictions to fit our current world), but having just finished The Soul of a New Machine the other day I was struck by the second half of the chapter "Going to the Fair" and its prescience for a computerized world that ended up being not that far off. Similarly, the BBC's Computer Literacy Project videos (thanks HN for that) has a series, aired in 1980, on silicon chips, and people in the first episode who are asked about the future of computers were also hitting things close to the mark.