A Thing of the past
Dec. 19th, 2023 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
supergeeI am more and more concurring with Barry Malzberg’s idea that science fiction was a 20th-century phenomenon. Back then the first approximation of the fantasy/science fiction difference was that fantasy was about exciting but impossible things like dragons and magick swords but science fiction was about our real future: space flight, robot maids, and artificial intelligence. Now we know better.
OK, so I’m cherry picking. Fifty years ago I was on the side of the Buck Rodgers dreamers who wanted to dodge the drafts, not necessarily the military one but the tedious business of generating from scratch a first draft, second draft,…perhaps ad infinitum. We dreamed that the gods or the scientists would give us a Magickal Screen, a device that would create a First Draft in the Sky that we could revise, correct, rearrange and then have reproduced materially without further effort on our part….As you may have guessed, I am writing these words on such a contrivance.
It’s the missing parts of the dreams that hurt. One needs little more organic intelligence than Elon Musk* to see that we are trapped at the bottom of a gravity well, with no hope of getting any further that invading one or two neighboring wells.
More than twenty years ago someone said, “Artificial intelligence is twenty years away…and always will be.” That prophecy has been fulfilled. What humanity gets better and better at is creating ways for superhumanly fast computing to look like the product of actual human thought. As Charles Stross noted from looking up “Charles Stross,” the more enhanced the interrogation becomes, the greater the distance from mere consensus reality. As he put it, “They deliver a lump of text in the shape of an answer.”
*Intelligence, not feral, zero-sum business skills
OK, so I’m cherry picking. Fifty years ago I was on the side of the Buck Rodgers dreamers who wanted to dodge the drafts, not necessarily the military one but the tedious business of generating from scratch a first draft, second draft,…perhaps ad infinitum. We dreamed that the gods or the scientists would give us a Magickal Screen, a device that would create a First Draft in the Sky that we could revise, correct, rearrange and then have reproduced materially without further effort on our part….As you may have guessed, I am writing these words on such a contrivance.
It’s the missing parts of the dreams that hurt. One needs little more organic intelligence than Elon Musk* to see that we are trapped at the bottom of a gravity well, with no hope of getting any further that invading one or two neighboring wells.
More than twenty years ago someone said, “Artificial intelligence is twenty years away…and always will be.” That prophecy has been fulfilled. What humanity gets better and better at is creating ways for superhumanly fast computing to look like the product of actual human thought. As Charles Stross noted from looking up “Charles Stross,” the more enhanced the interrogation becomes, the greater the distance from mere consensus reality. As he put it, “They deliver a lump of text in the shape of an answer.”
*Intelligence, not feral, zero-sum business skills
