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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

So this is why weapons have manual aim in sci-fi movies! You'd think that war would be fully computerized in the future, but all sides must have decided that was a bad idea.

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i'm reminded of the prologue of Ian Bank's Excession which describes how a ship Mind (a vast incredibly powerful AI) is overwhelmed and subverted, its ship taken over by an excessive and overwhelming force, and only a solitary drone is able to make it off the ship after running a gambit as the force tries to stop the drone. most of the attack, the attempt to defend against it and the final hail mary by the drone takes place within thousands of a second.

also i'm reminded of battlestar galactica and how deeply distrustful they are of computers and tech because of everything that has happened to them.

Not to mention the Butlerian Jihad in the backstory of _Dune_, and the enduring ban on thinking machines. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

There's also the attack of the evil AI known as "The Blight" in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon The Deep."

Burnside’s Zeroth Law of space combat:

Science fiction fans relate more to human beings than to silicon chips.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/crew.php#id--Yo...

With exception of Iain M Banks novels.

Even there, the Minds are written to be very… human. They are written to think faster, but I think it’s probably impossible to write a realistic superhuman mind. Certainly impossible where said Minds have the capacity to internally replicate the full consciousness of billions of humans so much faster than real time that those simultated humans could between themselves play a game of John Searle’s Chinese Room that itself was both genuinely conscious and running faster than real time.

Never realized this. But very true. Except in the novelization of Halo, where all the space battles have realistic scale and distances and the firing solutions are done by the AI.

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