There is a scene in "The Algebraist" (2004, Ian M. Banks) the leader of the invading space army (who is ruthless and petty) makes a demand for information of the gas giant aliens known as "the dwellers."
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More interesting to me on this re-read were the bits of the book about artificial intelligences. I don't think many SF writers have hit the mark on the real issues that AI might raise. But it's understandable. Writers care about characters so they want AI to be a character, and they want to wrestle with questions of humanity and discrimination. All very interesting.
Not relevant to the thing that is being called AI right now.
The exploration of AI we need is the one that grapples with the way that people will ascribe life, agency, trust to the obviously inanimate.
Think about the movie "Castaway" Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is so alone that he makes himself a friend/god out of a volleyball with a bloody hand-print on it. He talks to it. He prays. He needs it to limit his creeping madness in isolation.
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There is a scene in "The Algebraist" (2004, Ian M. Banks) the leader of the invading space army (who is ruthless and petty) makes a demand for information of the gas giant aliens known as "the dwellers."
He proceeds to shoot living people, (just random ordinary people) out of his ship's gun like bullets to suffocate in space.
A decade ago I thought this was a little silly and over the top. "Come on Mr. Banks, I understand you want to lampoon warmongers, but this is too much."
I get it now.
There are so many ways Banks saw more clearly than most of us. Even when he knew he was dying he said this:
> “I won't miss waiting for the next financial disaster because we haven't dealt with the underlying causes of the last one. Nor will I be disappointed not to experience the results of the proto-fascism that's rearing its grisly head right now. It's the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief.
[contd]
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There are so many ways Banks saw more clearly than most of us. Even when he knew he was dying he said this:
> “I won't miss waiting for the next financial disaster because we haven't dealt with the underlying causes of the last one. Nor will I be disappointed not to experience the results of the proto-fascism that's rearing its grisly head right now. It's the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief.
[contd]
> "I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault. So I might escape having to witness even greater catastrophe.”
[fin]
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The exploration of AI we need is the one that grapples with the way that people will ascribe life, agency, trust to the obviously inanimate.
Think about the movie "Castaway" Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is so alone that he makes himself a friend/god out of a volleyball with a bloody hand-print on it. He talks to it. He prays. He needs it to limit his creeping madness in isolation.
That inability to simply be alone is very real and very human. When you talk to a chatbot you are talking to a rubber duck, a volleyball, yourself.
But it isn't a self help exercise. It is a prescribed job requirement. It is a solution looking for a problem.
The "AI" SF story would not have amazing thinking computers who scare people who don't want to recognize they are human. It would have wooden dolls and people that get mad at you if you don't say "hello" and play along.
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The exploration of AI we need is the one that grapples with the way that people will ascribe life, agency, trust to the obviously inanimate.
Think about the movie "Castaway" Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is so alone that he makes himself a friend/god out of a volleyball with a bloody hand-print on it. He talks to it. He prays. He needs it to limit his creeping madness in isolation.
@futurebird I can't believe you know the character's name!
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The exploration of AI we need is the one that grapples with the way that people will ascribe life, agency, trust to the obviously inanimate.
Think about the movie "Castaway" Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is so alone that he makes himself a friend/god out of a volleyball with a bloody hand-print on it. He talks to it. He prays. He needs it to limit his creeping madness in isolation.
@futurebird
Think about cars.
(The one thing I'd do immediately, if ever became World Dictator, would be to remove the possibility of personalised numberplates. Random plate, no exceptions.)(Though I think BB King calling all his guitars Lucille is probably less of an issue.)
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> "I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault. So I might escape having to witness even greater catastrophe.”
[fin]
@jackwilliambell @futurebird He wasn't wrong, sadly.
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@futurebird I can't believe you know the character's name!
I totally looked it up. LOL. I hate it when people call a character in a movie "Tom Hanks" when that was just who played that character.
OK I don't "hate" it ... just a pet peeve.
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@jackwilliambell @futurebird He wasn't wrong, sadly.
I know. Some guys are just like that.
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The exploration of AI we need is the one that grapples with the way that people will ascribe life, agency, trust to the obviously inanimate.
Think about the movie "Castaway" Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is so alone that he makes himself a friend/god out of a volleyball with a bloody hand-print on it. He talks to it. He prays. He needs it to limit his creeping madness in isolation.
@futurebird In a recent story of mine, “Death and the Gorgon”, a sheriff’s deputy bonds a little too strongly with his very much non-sentient AI tool and it ... does not go well.
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@jackwilliambell @futurebird He wasn't wrong, sadly.
@jackwilliambell @futurebird @janeishly he's still greatly missed.
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> "I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault. So I might escape having to witness even greater catastrophe.”
[fin]
@jackwilliambell @futurebird a bit of a tangent, but - the ‘wrongheaded’ response is ginned up by the rich, powerful people who broke our society. Getting angry with people for being manipulated doesn’t help anything really.
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More interesting to me on this re-read were the bits of the book about artificial intelligences. I don't think many SF writers have hit the mark on the real issues that AI might raise. But it's understandable. Writers care about characters so they want AI to be a character, and they want to wrestle with questions of humanity and discrimination. All very interesting.
Not relevant to the thing that is being called AI right now.
@futurebird I love Banks’ Culture novels, and that society is closest to my sci-fi ideal, but I’m *very* dubious that humans could have much shared interests with miles-long AI-powered warships (however cool their names may be).
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That inability to simply be alone is very real and very human. When you talk to a chatbot you are talking to a rubber duck, a volleyball, yourself.
But it isn't a self help exercise. It is a prescribed job requirement. It is a solution looking for a problem.
The "AI" SF story would not have amazing thinking computers who scare people who don't want to recognize they are human. It would have wooden dolls and people that get mad at you if you don't say "hello" and play along.
@futurebird i stumbled on that some time ago, and i think it makes sense in the context, people have been using what is essentially random processes, and ascribing meaning to them, for probably tens of thousands of years, all around the world, we call it divination, but it's always variation of this. Random process to create a "message", and the "interpreter" does all the work of giving it sense.
LLMs is that, but the work to make messages make sense just got a thousand times easier. -
@futurebird i stumbled on that some time ago, and i think it makes sense in the context, people have been using what is essentially random processes, and ascribing meaning to them, for probably tens of thousands of years, all around the world, we call it divination, but it's always variation of this. Random process to create a "message", and the "interpreter" does all the work of giving it sense.
LLMs is that, but the work to make messages make sense just got a thousand times easier.@futurebird The fact that we have built systems in which "sense" can be checked more reliably, and tested against specifications, is probably a reason why the main success use case for LLMs is semi-automated programming. But how much sense can we reliably make up in the air this way, and expect our systems to maintain coherence (internally, and to our expectations), without having made the work to really inspect it ourselves (and without having a deterministic process to do so, like a compiler)?
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@futurebird The fact that we have built systems in which "sense" can be checked more reliably, and tested against specifications, is probably a reason why the main success use case for LLMs is semi-automated programming. But how much sense can we reliably make up in the air this way, and expect our systems to maintain coherence (internally, and to our expectations), without having made the work to really inspect it ourselves (and without having a deterministic process to do so, like a compiler)?
@futurebird But the main point is not so much about computers, it's about our brains, and how primed we are to see meaning where there is none, so when the message is really designed by a complex machine to really look like something with meaning, it's really, really, hard not to see any in it, if you pay a little attention to it. If you do, you have to go much deeper into it, to see the gaps, the inconsistencies, and we, as a species, are not as great as that as we think we are.
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The exploration of AI we need is the one that grapples with the way that people will ascribe life, agency, trust to the obviously inanimate.
Think about the movie "Castaway" Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is so alone that he makes himself a friend/god out of a volleyball with a bloody hand-print on it. He talks to it. He prays. He needs it to limit his creeping madness in isolation.
@futurebird The sad fact is that fiction and character designers need to stop depicting machines as human and start depicting them as what they are: doppelgangers. Facestealers. Even (loaded with millennia of misogyny as they are) the original mythical depictions of succubi and sirens as man-eating monsters.
Because that's the truth of what these things are: human-form mimics that lure real people to their horrific doom without even the physical capability for morality or remorse.
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The exploration of AI we need is the one that grapples with the way that people will ascribe life, agency, trust to the obviously inanimate.
Think about the movie "Castaway" Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is so alone that he makes himself a friend/god out of a volleyball with a bloody hand-print on it. He talks to it. He prays. He needs it to limit his creeping madness in isolation.
I humbly submit this essay from 2023:
https://ninelives.karawynnlong.com/language-is-a-poor-heuristic-for-intelligence/ -
The exploration of AI we need is the one that grapples with the way that people will ascribe life, agency, trust to the obviously inanimate.
Think about the movie "Castaway" Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is so alone that he makes himself a friend/god out of a volleyball with a bloody hand-print on it. He talks to it. He prays. He needs it to limit his creeping madness in isolation.
@futurebird
Blindsight by Peter Watts has some interesting exploration that feels relevant to this moment with LLM chatbots... -
There is a scene in "The Algebraist" (2004, Ian M. Banks) the leader of the invading space army (who is ruthless and petty) makes a demand for information of the gas giant aliens known as "the dwellers."
He proceeds to shoot living people, (just random ordinary people) out of his ship's gun like bullets to suffocate in space.
A decade ago I thought this was a little silly and over the top. "Come on Mr. Banks, I understand you want to lampoon warmongers, but this is too much."
I get it now.
@futurebird
I wonder if the Spielberg/Kubrick "A.I." deserves a re-watch? My memory of it is of how, watching it, I instantly wanted to be sucked in to it as a re-telling "Pinocchio", until I started realizing that the kid was just a toaster. The more unsettling and unwatchable it becomes, the better it got.
