Looking into the future… through a glass, darkly. Look, it is part of what sf is all about. Not all about – we tell stories, for money. Sometimes all that matters is the story is entertaining. The sf side is setting, as in ‘space opera’. The Karres books were space opera, but even there I couldn’t resist playing with ideas about social and economic systems as well as of course, biology. Look, my books are not really intended to be straight-forward prognostication, but I do fiddle with predicting science (RBV I made a couple of predictions that have come to be, SLOWTRAIN and the concept of surface area, not volume being the determinant of space habitat viability, I bet will still be correct).
I must admit the last while has seen me looking into the future and thinking that it’s a very dark window, even for writers. AI or rather LLM’s… well I think they will change humanity’s course, but I doubt it will be in any of the ways predicted. Two factors come into this: bureaucracy (where rote makes it heaven for LLMs) will resist at all costs. And secondly… LLM are at this stage anyway a very poor ROI and vastly energy expensive to run. I know- free at the moment. The first fix is always free. I do wonder about medium term for my own profession: LLMs are quite fond of fiction, and produce it right now to please people (Lawyers needing cases to support their arguments have discovered this to their cost.) Will AI make human progress greater… or stall, because it does foster laziness. LLM are not truly inventive (neither are all authors)
Robots… well, now. I have to wonder if humanoid robots are the future. I mean, really, they’re flexible. Will they be cheap? I mean they do lousy jobs that humans don’t want to do for the pay NOW. But there is no telling what the future will bring. My children’s children might be glad of a dangerous dirty job, of too low a value to risk an expensive robot on.
Implants – well I look forward to the day implants can help with blindness, for example… but data straight to the brain? How do you know what the data you get is even vaguely real? You might be lying in a fetid puddle and think you’re running through the fields. Even if it is just information – hell, we can’t trust the media now, what do you think direct access to your brain will do for you? I am sure we could trust government to check it was just fine. And books? Story straight to brain?
And then of course there is money. That sort of rests on trust. Money – even gold has little value per se. It’s a means of exchange, that governments are very keen on you using, because it is easy to tax, easy to value (I have lots of corn. You are starving. You will perform any service for a pound of corn. Or you are not starving and will do very little for a pound of corn. What is the value of that corn? Taxman wants to know), Governments can print it and inflate their debts away (so they borrow more). But is it a stable repository? What is actually worth? (Bitcoin should have you asking these questions). At the moment it exists because of convenience and government enforcement (Govt. would like you to be entirely digital, let alone use their money for transactions). But it is intrinsically worthless, based purely in trust in government and the status quo. Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany exemplify that breaking down, and what happens. Looking further back, the influx of precious metals to Europe from the Americas and elsewhere… changed power dynamics. Golden asteroids – or robot factories could change ours…
And then there is demographics and future of nations as a result. It wasn’t that long ago we were convinced SOYLENT GREEN, and LAST STAND ON ZANZIBAR were the near future. I’m still not convinced Kornbluth wasn’t onto something with the MARCHING MORONS… There is little doubt that human socio-politics isn’t coping with this trend.
sf… the country of the thinking man.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Through a glass, darkly”
I find it hard to believe humans will be worth less than a robot, long term. The cost to produce a piece of technology tends to drop with time. Plus, robots will do as they are told.
This seems nasty, but is accurate: there are historical precedents (Both Japanese and Germans in WW2 for just 2 of many) where the rulers actually were perfectly happy if human slaves died. Machinery and tools (even simple cheap tools) had value. Humans – at least some of them, none. It’s something I would hate to have happen again, but it could.
Worth … to whom? Sociopaths graduate to positions of power.
LLMs are (IMO) a dead end without adding reference data sets and requiring responses to a query be answered based on only the reference data. Otherwise responding with statistically probably language is the only requirement. They consume huge amounts of power to train and almost as much to run to get responses that have to be verified in detail before using. A recent cautionary tale is the man who was told he could replace the table salt in his diet with sodium bromide and nearly died from bromine poisoning.
The image and video generators on the gripping hand are getting better and better, witness the images for the ‘Postcards from’ series from Rac Press as an example of how Cedar leveraged her skills to generate lots of images quickly on demand.
Even further, if you think about it we can generate every Adam Selene video from MIAHM without needing a Mike at all. Prof writes the scripts and the Video tool generates the presentation. A it of tweaking the pacing and you have Adam speaking to the Loonies. Most of the rest of the service Mike provided to the revolution are achievable now too like cell security, monitoring the Warden and his goons, etc.
I remember, early in the book, Manuel mentions a major upgrade to Mike — a new memory bank with ‘ten to the tenth bits capacity’.
That’s a little more than a gigabyte.
Today, I can get a Raspberry Pi computer with a 4-core 64-bit ARM-V7 processor and 16 GB of RAM for $120. None of mine have started trying to tell jokes.
We’ve still got 50 years to go until the time of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. I don’t think we’ll have conscious, self-aware computers then, either.
Yeah, but it’s one of those things–like time travel–that are a lot of fun to play with, for a writer.
Oh, it is, but pretending that binary digital computers — no matter how fast their processors or how much RAM they have — can achieve conscious self-awareness by running procedural programs is fantasy, not science fiction.
Computers that truly think would have to be radically different in both hardware and software. We’re no closer to them today than Charles Babbage was.
Hey, it’s way past 2007 and we still don’t have the flying cars and surgically implanted phones of The Puppet Masters.
Although some folks’ phones might be stuck tight enough to their ears that removal would require medical assistance. 😀