5 ms·
The Answer (1954)
- dash2 1y agoDirect link: https://archive.org/details/angelsspaceships0000fred/page/36/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/angelsspaceships0000fred/page/36...
- dooglius 1y agoThe review is only a little shorter than the story!
- ajkjk 1y agoI think if a story gives you a sense of wonder when you're young, it's a good story, even if it seems cheesy later. Probably the reason it doesn't later is that you saw so many things like that when you were young and they don't surprise you anymore.
- antisthenes 1y agoI agree. I would give anything to feel a sense of wonder that I used to get when reading sci-fi in my youth. But "can't enter the same river twice" and all that.
- xmprt 1y agoWho's writing good scifi these days which evoke that same sense of wonder? Project Hail Mary was a fun read but felt a bit too in the weeds with the details.
- bobbiechen 1y agoGotta be Ted Chiang. Try his short story collection titled Exhalation: Stories.
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoA bit like saying Shakespeare is full of cliché’s. Which it is, but it literally invented those cliché’s.
- joblessjunkie 1y agoReminds me quite a bit of Asimov’s “The Last Question”, which mines the same “computer-as-God” vein, is also very short, and has a suspiciously related title. Asimov’s story appeared in 1956, just two years later.
- gjm11 1y agoMy exact thought process on seeing the title here: "Ah, 'insufficient data for meaningful answer'. No, wait, that one's called 'The Last Question'. So perhaps it's 'There is now'." :-) (Asimov's is better. Also, the version of this one in my memory is better than the actual story, in that "There is now" is better than the rather clunky equivalent in the story. I suppose it's possible that I'm remembering a different, slightly better written, story with the exact same idea.)
- igravious 1y agoCame here to ask what was the Asimov story that echoed this ...
- Animats 1y agoIt's the same story as "Company Man", posted here yesterday. But it was a new idea when Asimov wrote it.
- dredmorbius 1y ago<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45443298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45443298>
- rbanffy 1y agoYou might call it weak and gimmicky all you want, but it entrenched itself deeply into our collective imagination. I saw many people come up independently with a direct quote from this story when they saw the IBM promotional image of a man standing in front of an IBM Quantum System One machine. The image: https://www.techmonitor.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2023/06/GettyImages-1182902371.jpg https://www.techmonitor.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2023/...
- imglorp 1y agoI think humans are weak and prone to leaping on gimmicks and extrapolating with limited information to wherever their imagination takes them. If shown a dazzling, mysterious, $10m glass cube draped with all that hyperbolic "quantum future wow!!" marketing, ordinarily smart people will leap to anything. In reality, QC doesn't seem to have a ton of applications yet.
- rbanffy 1y agoA lot, if not all, of those references were in jest. Nobody was expecting the machine to be an actual deity.
- IAmBroom 1y agoThe post you're replying to doesn't suggest anyone expected deification. The post suggests sparkly marketing hooplah wrapping up meager actuality.
- rbanffy 1y ago> The post suggests sparkly marketing hooplah wrapping up meager actuality. I don't think any of those who quoted from this story fell into the marketing hyperbole. We all know these machines are interesting engineering marvels, but far from actually useful at the moment, with the exception of a very narrow set of problems that fall within the narrow capabilities. The people who fell for it probably never heard of this story.
- satisfice 1y agoSee Arthur C. Clark, Nine Billion Names of God, from 1953
- readthenotes1 1y agoFred Brown is also responsible for a famous Star Trek episode
- anonymousiam 1y agohttps://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Fredric_Brown https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Fredric_Brown
- igravious 1y agoWas there a similar Asimov story that ended with the words, "let there be light!" ?
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYep. Called "The Last Question": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
- ray02398 1y agoI remember trying this on Wolfram Alpha when it launched back around 2010. https://smallthingsmostly.me/istheregod https://smallthingsmostly.me/istheregod