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Comment by gb2d_hn | Hacker News Reader

As I commented in another thread: I just finished a very short story by Ted Chiang - 'The evolution of Human science' it starts at the point where it's 25 years since humans contributed a scientific paper because 'meta humans' now handle all research, and communicate digitally such that humans can only get a low fidelity report of what the agents actually know, and the endeavour to understand has become like a best effort archeological like hobby for interested humans. The story assumes that the 'meta humans' will always act in humans best interests. I believe it's from 2002, it's incredibly precient (The stories of your life and others is the collection the story is in. Many of them are very relevant to modern AI actually).

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There are a few interesting takes on this.

- In Blindsight [1] the main character is a "synthesist", part of his job is to figure out what much more intelligent transhuman or artificial intelligence is up to and translate it to normal people.

- In Children of Time [2] the character is a "classicist", he studies ancient technology, which is far more advanced than the technology humans have in his era thanks to a technological collapse.

Ted Chiang's story came first, but these are still over a decade (or two) old.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)

I'm ashamed to say I've started both of these and not managed to finish :) I will try again (kiddo's tire me out and means Ted Chaings short stories are perfect!)

As one friend put their endorsement of Ted Chiang: sometimes you don't need 200 pages to make a point.

In general, though, it's amazing how much hard science fiction authors managed to get right. I've read quite a few 20 year old books recently and while I might just be selecting those that aged well, someone definitely saw it all coming.

Your friends quote is so true. There's too many thin stories with empty padding around them to make an idea a novel!

Interesting. I have read that collection but I completely forgot about this story.

Blindsight also has augmented humans whose reasoning is beyond baseline human understanding and there are dedicated people that are there to bridge the communication.

There's a couple in that collection - 'Understand' is about a brain injury patient that gets an experimental treatment and becomes super intelligent - what he does with that intelligence and humanities attempts to restrain him, and 'Division by Zero' is a mathematicians struggle to continue with life when a discovery undermines all of mathematics. It's a great collection.

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