How accurately did science fiction stories predict AI?
jamesyu.org
jamesyu.org
(1) Butlerian Jihad. Sanderson's Skyward at least had a reason.
(2) Banks's Culture had a possible future. I'm sure there are others, but not many.
I think about this a lot, and while I have tons of near future sci-fi ideas (which probably would have seemed very far future, 10-20, years ago), I just can't conceive of anything much farther out. I guess that's why they call it the "singularity".
>the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.
Star Trek and Banks' are post-capitalist futures.
The only slightly fleshed out bit of Star Trek is the military, not the planetary society.
Star Trek, as much as I love it, does not really grapple with AI heavily, and I already mentioned Banks.
Jack Williamson made a case for humans resisting doing nothing: With Folded Hands ... (1947) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands_...
The umbrella term is speculative fiction. The author starts by assuming that the world works in certain ways, and then tries to figure out the consequences.
1) Masters of Science Fiction tv series from 2007 Episode 5 "Little Brother" - A person "jailbreaks" the judge who is sentencing him.
2) Terminator 3 rise of the machines - in the beginning they talk about allowing Skynet access to their military systems and so on to eliminate a virus, and they have no idea how it will react. Echoes a little bit where we are now.
These aren't perfect of course but kind of interesting to see at present day
Much early SF thinking was that AIs would be logical. That's what I was taught, going through Stanford back when the logicians were in charge. They were trying to hammer the real world into predicate calculus. That turned out to be totally wrong.
Almost everybody in SF underestimated the difficulty of robot unstructured manipulation. So did people in AI. They still do. Most SF assumed that robots would be able to do most eye/hand tasks before they could talk. No. Still unsolved. LLMs don't seem to help all that much. Written language doesn't have much info on grasping, and watching without doing is only marginally helpful.
Asimov's robot novels were all about alignment, and why alignment is hard. That was prophetic.
Banks' Culture novels are great, but they're for a future that has a lot of new physics.
Now what? What we seem to be headed for in the near term is the fast automation of most white collar work, but not blue collar work. SF foresaw that future a few times. One example is the Rosinante Trilogy from 1981, where there's a boss of an orbital space colony, an AI as middle management, and union labor doing the real work. That's a hard SF view. There's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, from 2010, where the protagonist's supervisor is "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 with passive-aggressive set to low." It's a minor part of the comedic plot there. And, of course, there's Manna, from 2003, which is looking all too likely.
In both cases the question is the same: How to create a compelling plot, either for a story or for your life, in a world where human mental abilities are vastly inferior to those of AI?
From a pessimistic perspective, you could think of reasons why a misaligned AI keeps humans alive. Does it simply enslave humans and use us for our fine-manipulation capabilities until it can get proper robotics up and running? Does it want to observe us scientifically? Does it want to use captive humans as bargaining chips with other civilizations as it expands through the galaxy? Or does it have some sort of quasi-religious respect for humans, e.g. reasoning that keeping us on a reservation of some kind reduces the risk that a simulator-god pulls the plug on the universe?
From an optimistic perspective, what sort of conflicts would exist in a utopia? Stories need conflict to be interesting. And IRL, even if humans are living in relative utopia, they'll still get stir-crazy and create conflict. Even in countries that are very wealthy by global or historical standards, political competition can still be quite bitter, for example. How would a superintelligent AI manage this?
I'm reminded of the stories I read set in Karl Schroeder's Virga universe as a kid. All the characters and plot exist inside a planet-sized balloon filled with gas. But it takes a while for the reader to figure this out, because most of the setting is focused on the details: rotating habitats, air transport, artificial mini-suns, etc.
In the same way, good post-singularity fiction might very well put the AI deep in the background.
Imagine, for example, a story about some friends surviving, exploring, and doing battle in an ancient ruin full of puzzles. Only gradually do you realize that the ancient ruin was designed as a moon-sized escape room by a superintelligent AI. The moon-sized escape room already has centuries of lore, and the escape record to beat is measured in years or decades. But because the escape room "rules of engagement" are so well-defined, the players are deeply immersed and barely think about the fact that the moon is AI-designed. Perhaps some high-tech psychoactive drug or brain implant could play a role in facilitating suspension of disbelief.
Just like Virga, this deep background only gets revealed when the reader is thoroughly invested in the story, and overall is not treated as especially important. The story could be a philosophical meditation on the long-term future of AI-designed art and entertainment. See if you can steelman the pro-AI-art position.
Or another: it just ignores us, but keeps the good resources to itself. There's still humanity, but it's brutish and primitive, regressed to the stone age, and pushed to the margins. Basically feral animals. They know about the AI's works, but don't understand them. The smart ones stay away out of fear, the dumb ones go where they're not wanted and get killed by pest control.
There are so many bad ends to this, and not many plausible good ones. But of course we have no choice but to race forward, off the cliff. After all, we can't let China be the ones that push humanity off it first!
(I read some bits and pieces, would not recommend!)
Weasel words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Clar...
The premise is that AI never came around and we were left scavenging code since that was more efficient than writing new code. But with LLMs, it’s much easier to write new than to scavenge.
A much more realistic example of AI and starflight: good old Rocheworld by Robert Forward.
- Sally, Asimov 1953 (spot on with Waymo)
- I, Robot etc, Asimov
- HAL 2001 A Space Odyssey
- any Iain M. Banks Culture novelIt might not have predicted LLMs but it certainly fit with Herbert's ongoing thematic study of people in insane environments producing unanticipated outcomes.
> A high-scoring story shows readers moved by machine literature, editors publishing it, an audience enjoying its music, or critics taking the work seriously.
How is this a criterion for LLMs being sci-fi AI? If anything, opposite is true. It seems that the author is comparing his own sci-fi image of LLMs with sci-fi. Or Claude's vision of itself, I guess, since this is all vibe-written except the initial few lines.
>The two machines begin with arithmetic and soon communicate through mathematics their engineers can’t follow. That’s the most relevant prediction here: machine intellectual activity racing ahead of the people supervising it.
This misses the specificity of the scene's prediction. Colossus and Guardian are basically speaking in the style of the super-dense, almost incomprehensible-to-human chain of thought that LLMs indulge in nowadays. One might also point to the just-released news of LLMs easily seeing patterns, incomprehensible to humans, in model weights.
I used to dismiss anything near-future involving any robot or AI you could just talk to. Now it exists. Unfathomable.
Whereas fantasy authors write stuff like "a sufficiently large pile of books becomes an intelligence" (Pratchett) and that's pretty much what's happened...
I don’t recall his robots having problems with creativity nor lying - precisely Daniel in the post-Foundation books was found to have developed a zeroth law which he used not only to lie but also to creatively get the universe back on Seldon’s plan after the Mule disrupted it. There were also stories in the robot/Spacer era pre-Foundation where robots lied precisely because they had to to save a human life or themselves. And the robots were creative - the human inspector those series followed relied on the creativity of his robot companion (Daniel) to help him.
But I thought in the lying thing Daneel was unusual in succeeding.
> I agree with Ursula Le Guin that “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” To me, the interesting parts of science fiction isn’t how accurately it extrapolates into the future, but rather, given a future circumstance, how might be?
You can read her views at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand... .
"""Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look!"""
Le Guin's view, as I understand it, is that science fiction is about describing the present, even when it takes place in the future.
I spot-checked "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". It ranks a 2 for scaling, but according to the guidelines it should rank 0, because "A giant computer that merely stores more records doesn’t count for much. Neither does a magical threshold where the machine suddenly wakes up." and Mike's description is literally that he woke up when he reached that threshold.
It's on the first page. https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-DFY-783/page/8/mode/2up?q...
The growth in Mike's abilities is not from putting new hardware online, but because he matures like a person does, for example, https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-DFY-783/page/64/mode/2up?... , which also describe the even as "woke".
I don't see how one can read the book and miss that.
I also don't like the omission of Wyoh's contribution to Mike's training.
I mean look how most science fiction of the 1980s depicted the world of the future as dominated by Japan... Look at Robocop 3 :)
Computers were then just appearing or increasing in public discussion, along with fears that they'll make humans less human somehow: Like in this Computer Chronicles video about word processing from 1983 at 4:08: "Some writers are concerned that computer assistance may promote dry bland writing."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt0OoXluC8g
AI predictions were generally hostile to humanity: Terminator appeared in 1984, and the first Alien movie in 1979 had an antagonist android. 2001 A Space Odyssey with a disagreeable AI came out in 1968. All way before the real world had anything remotely close to today's AI: It was a reaction to the appearance of computers themselves.
On the other hand, Star Trek had optimistic AI like Data.
Humankind's own sentient creations leading to the ruin of humans is probably a trope in fiction since thousands of years, with golems or summoned demons etc.
Robbie the Robot (Forbidden Planet, 1956) "The Robot" (Lost in Space, 1965-1968). Twiki and Dr. Theopolis (Buck Rogers, 1979–1981), Zen[1] and Orac (Blake's 7, 1978-1981), R2-D2 and C3PO (Star Wars, 1977).
Computers were part of public discussion well before the 1980s.
Nixon's famous radio 1974 radio address was about the American right of privacy: "There are, of course, many facts which modern government must know in order to function. As a result, a vast store of personal data has been built up over the years. With the advent of the computer in the 1960's, this data gathering process has become a big business in the United States--over $20 billion a year--and the names of over 150 million Americans are now in computer banks scattered across the country." This lead to the Privacy Act of 1974.
The late 1960s reaction to how computers were used was to bomb and invade data centers. 1970 was "the year of the crisis", according to Computerworld in 1971. https://archive.org/details/sim_computerworld_december-30-19...
[1] "I have failed you. I am sorry." still brings tears to my eyes.
The general air is so pessimistic that we forget about those!
And don't forget Number 5! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Circuit_(1986_film)