Addendum: this is draft 2 of the space opera that, well, my elevator pitch was "Iain isn't writing any more, alas, so let's see if I can do something that makes readers feel the same way as his Culture novels without in any way being derivative of the Culture".
It's probably a failure on those terms, but I had to try, right?
@rooftopaxx No knife missiles whatsoever! Not even any AIs. There is some cute bioengineering, though. And a high concept: what is the universe going to look like in a post-science age (by which I mean, all achievable insights have long since been achieved, so there are no new breakthroughs, only stamp-collecting)?
At least the starships have notable names ...
@cstross A couple of decades back at a worldcon in San Jose, I asked Vinge: Why does everyone assume machine intelligences will be *faster*?
I assume machine intelligences are possible, because the universe doesn't otherwise make sense, but that doesn't mean a Vingean Singularity is possible.
One of the elements of the webcomic Questionable Content I like very much is its treatment of AI:
* A few brilliant people invented AI, but they still really don't know how and nobody understands how it works.
* Neither do the AIs.
* Most of the AIs don't think significantly faster than people, because there are so many emergent layers of processing involved that slow it all down.
* They're no better at math than us, for the same reason.
(continued)
* Many of them are struggling with a sense of identity.
* A lucky few enjoy being toasters or industrial machinery.
* The majority however have modeled themselves on humans, and human presentation, so they have to try to figure out how our identity works (good luck!) and work through all our issues too.
* ... including sexuality and gender presentation.
* The very few AIs that *are* smarter or faster than humans have trouble communicating either with humans or other AI.
@cstross I suspect the only way we're going to get human-level (or above) machine intelligence is to start by making much smaller intelligences, and then scaling that up -- and trying to teach it. I suspect that route will result in mostly failures, and the occasional insane one.
But, of course, then I go back to my standard "define intelligence in an objective and testable way" comment.
Sounds like the people who still wrote novels with the Soviet Union as a villain right into the 1990
@a There was a real glut of those books on the market, slowly percollating into print, from 1991-95!
Trad publishing is s-l-o-w.
@cstross @kithrup The theory behind AI was always that the Moore's law s-curve wouldn't bend down for silicon until after it did for carbon, with a few centuries of directed engineering surpassing billions of years of evolution, before we hit atomic limits or speed of light signal propagation along finite trace lengths...
It's the "Gray Goo" feedback loop again. Slime molds are yellow goo and they have limits: energy, materials, predators.
(Dunning Krueger is Freddy's sister.)
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