So finally got around to watching a recent movie that I won’t name since I am not sure if it was part of the marketing, but the premise was that there was an all powerful AI that was going to take over the world and it used a mixture of predictive reasoning, control of technology, and limited human agents who were given a heads up on what was coming.
It was… mostly disappointing and felt like a much tamer version of Linda Nagata’s The Red (apologies as that is TECHNICALLY a spoiler, but the twist is revealed like a hundred pages into the first book that came out a decade ago). And an even weaker version still of Person of Interest.
Because if we are in the world where an AI has access to every camera on the planet and can hack communications in real time and so forth: We aren’t going to have vague predictions of what someone might do. We are going to have Finch and Root at full power literally dodging bullets (and now I am sad again) and basically being untouchable. Or the soldiers of The Red who largely have what amounts to x-ray vision so long as they trust their AI overlord and shoot where told and so forth.
Or just the reality of how existential threats can be both detected and manufactured as the situation calls for utilizing existing resources/Nations.
Any suggestions for near future (although, I wouldn’t be opposed to a far future space opera take on this) stories that explore this? I don’t necessarily need a Frankenstein Complex “we must stop it because it is a form of life that is not us”, but I would definitely prefer an understanding of just how incredibly plausible this all is (again, I cannot gush enough about Linda Nagata’s The Red). Rather than vague hand waving to demonstrate the unique power of the human soul
spoiler
Or the large number of thetans within it
Accelerando by Charles Stross is a great one. The beginning to mid-book concepts of singularity gone wild are mind-blowing on their own… And then it explores “what would happen a few hundred years after that?” A few times.
Concepts that stuck with me are:
all the AI assisted devices helping you through your day eventually running without much of your input, only needing a human to justify being on: When the protagonists interface gets stolen the street-thief ends up closing his business deals, helpless to all the guidance in his head. Meanwhile the protagonist has an existential meltdown having only his brain to think with.
Economics 2.0: AI markets dominate the earth in search of customers to satisfy. Governments are overrun but poverty no longer exists. People are mixed on whether it is utopia or dystopia.
Father in the future: Mass=computation, so entire solar systems become giant thinking machines. But they are stuck in their local space-time, faced with having to shed mass and get dumber to move. Only smaller intelligences can travel, but they risk being gobbled up as more mass if the system they travel to doesn’t care about communicating with the rest of the galaxy.
Father in the future: the universe is a simulation, but through singularities there are simulations that can be reached from within the simulation. One AI has figured out how to send a message back from another simulation, but it means sending a copy of itself to a potentially eternal hell to check it out first.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html.
Also available from your friendly neighborhood mega corporate sales site.