JulesNew book: M.R. Carey's "Infinity Gate". Part one of a duology. Humanity accidentally discovers parallel dimensions, AI threatens everything. Some things always stay the same, I guess.
"She was a genius, but only in a small way. Her greatest discovery was made almost completely by accident, and it had been made before by others in a great many elsewheres. In fact Hadiz’s contribution to history is marked throughout by things done casually or without intention."
Why of course. A woman who's a genius scientist, period? Now, we can't have THAT. Just a genius in a small way! Making discoveries by accident! Unlike the male geniuses-in-a-big-way!
"Campus Cross was a small side project jointly owned by the Catholic Church and by three billionaires who had all separately decided that the world was now so badly screwed that their individual fortunes might not be enough to unscrew it."
I am kind of staring speechless at this concept.
Okay. We are going to need the "science. It does NOT work like this, folks" speech.
Hadiz is introduced as a "particle physicist" whose work requires "no mind or muscle other than her own". Which is a stretch even for a theoretician, but apparently she has a lab? There's no way you can run a modern research lab without assistants and grad students. It's not the 1500s anymore, folks.
This conversation is about an AI tool:
“Do you always use feminine pronouns when discussing strings of code?” Hadiz asked, by way of avoiding the invitation. She preferred to solve her problems under her own steam and indebted to no one. “I tell you, it’s hard not to with Rupshe. She skirts the edge of sentience.” “And do you think women do that too, Andris?”
Good one, Hadiz! 😂👍🏼
"Physicists divide the forces and effects that govern the universe into two separate categories, called scalar and vector."
Dude. If gravity were indeed a scalar or vector field, unifying all four forces would be A LOT easier!
Free worldbuilding tip: you CAN indeed have your great discovery happen off-screen and never give any details.
It's preferable to this lazy level of nonsensical technobabble.
"Hadiz put scalar and vector values together in the same box and shook them until their labels fell off. [...] She was hoping that if the dark energy boson wandered by it would be confused enough to stick around while she took its picture."
What.
"they had given the AI a personality – incurious, content, eager to please. Then they had frozen its understanding at the level of a three-year-old child by means of end-stopped programming pathways and brute-force overwrites. Keeping the Registry as stupid as a post was a large part of their work on a day-to-day basis."
Having been around three-year-olds, the idea of them being stupid as posts is laughable and insulting 🙄
"Destruction, mutual and assured, rained down on the just, the unjust, and every poor bastard in between. And here was Hadiz with the answer, the purest silver bullet that ever was. You didn’t need to fight resource wars if you could Step into another world. So what if you’d poisoned your air, your water, your soil? You could just grab some more from the dimension next door."
Ah yes, the colonizer mindset towards parallel universes.
“Teaching materials are drawn down from Central Curriculum. They come in a form that’s optimised for two-stage filtering, by the school AI and then by the students’ animas. [...] And if the teacher was required to do that filtering for every student, they would have no time left to teach.”
What, exactly, does teaching even mean if not figuring out what materials are relevant, helpful, engaging for and with your students?!
"What did he say? Paz asked Dulcie. A prayer, Dulcie said. Christ Jesus lift me when I fall, and trip those who cast me down. Who is Christ Jesus? If I had to guess, a god or goddess who protects the weak against the strong."
Jesus Christ, working-class goddess protector of the weak. I like it. 💙
Irina@quidcumque Cram it into their heads after someone/something else has figured that out, apparently. Gah. Teaching is such a joy when you can do the figuring out yourself. (I love it when I teach something to someone and then see that *they can actually do it*)
Proto Himbo European@quidcumque I'm of two minds about some of the excerpts so far. This one, for instance: I'm a professor and if I were required to personally tailor all my lessons to each of my students (which is maybe what is being described here), then I agree I'd have no time to do anything else. I prepare one lesson for 20 students, not 20 individual lessons.This excerpt sounds like it's trying to describe a common sci-fi trope: highly individualized education, as if each person had a personal tutor, rather than the mass-production compromise we generally make for cost reasons (i.e., because public education funding isn't enough for individualized instruction).
@guyjantic which is an okay trope, of course. It just doesn't fit with what we see of their education system.
I just have no idea what their teachers, who have so much time to teach, do exactly. They don't plan the lessons (centralized), they don't tailor the material (done by AI). All we get to see here is a pretty standard lecture format with all students assembled in a classroom. What exactly is the teacher's function then?
lizzzzard@quidcumque in the setup implied here, wouldn't it be something like working through roadblocks with them? Teachers are supposed to have both a deep understanding of the curriculum and knowledge of where every student stands and how they think/approach problems.
How you would do that for more than a handful of students at a time, Ave without having tailored their schedule and thus *thought about* where they currently stand, I don't know though.
@lizzard @quidcumque I think most teachers do that to the extent that we have time and resources (and knowledge of students' roadblocks). If that's all the author is implying, then the author is a bit clueless. I figured (from the short excerpt and my SFF assumptions) that it was supposed to be some futuristic (future-)AI-driven ultra-personalized thing, but maybe that's not what was being said.
@guyjantic @quidcumque yeah, and in that scenario, the teachers would have more time to do individual work, right?
I thought that was quidcumque's question - what the teachers' role was in that scenario.
@lizzard @quidcumque I personally would have time for research. Also playing disc golf and building silly things in my garage.
@quidcumque What exactly is the teacher's function then?
If I turn off my constant, hamster-on-wheel replay of this question in my head for the past 20 years thinking about my own job, then I'm left with a lovely fantasy of working 2 hours a week and getting full-time pay. A couple of decades of that might feel kind of nice.
If I turn off my constant, hamster-on-wheel replay of this question in my head for the past 20 years thinking about my own job, then I'm left with a lovely fantasy of working 2 hours a week and getting full-time pay. A couple of decades of that might feel kind of nice.
@quidcumque Argh!
@quidcumque Of course we would do this. Actually, I've read very few "moving between alternate universes" (including time travel) story where there wasn't at least some level of this, even if it's just stealing IP from the other place. Connie Willis stands out for her (brilliant IMO) conceptualization of time travel which, I now realize, prevents most forms of inter-reality colonization.
David McMullin@quidcumque
I don’t know any 3-year-olds these days, but my non-expert impression is that they are anything but “incurious.”
I don’t know any 3-year-olds these days, but my non-expert impression is that they are anything but “incurious.”
@quidcumque So the author doesn't understand genius, science, child cognitive development, or AI. Thank you for taking this bullet for the rest of us.
@quidcumque I think I see what they author is trying to do here, part of which is to write about something complex and beyond their own areas of knowledge, and it is failing miserably. They're trying to use high-level metaphors, adorned with slappy, colloquial syntax, to make this approach more palatable, maybe. It's too bad they put this in the narrator's voice (TBF, I think I've seen that done well, in contrast to this). It might have worked better if, for instance, someone else tried to characterize her work this way and she stared at them for a few seconds then said, "Sure. Yeah. Why not."
@quidcumque I am acquainted with a prof (female, as it turns out) who teaches a course about depictions of high intelligence in literature, especially (IIRC) sci-fi. I think depictions of "scientists" (or even "professors") by people who have equal ignorance about the institutional and intellectual realities of actual science is in this domain. If I wrote books about lawyers and courts, I'm sure they would sound just as stupid to people who knew anything about those domains.
@quidcumque Another excerpt where I have (only from this excerpt and my past experiences with SFF) a different take. When any character is described as a genius, I get a little bored and my expectations for the book drop (Oh, another super duper brilliant savant! This story will definitely be original and interesting!). There are ways to do it that don't make me roll my eyes, but I think it's pretty difficult to make that trope feel like anything besides the power fantasies of a teenage writer. I suspect describing this character as sort of bumbling toward career success was an attempt to dodge those criticisms.
Women in this role are (paradoxically, maybe) sometimes even worse as characters because I often feel there is an air of chip-on-the-shoulder misogyny. Heinlein and Stephenson, for instance, have superGeniusBrilliant female characters and their fans get really pissy when you point out that those characters' apparent intelligence was often a smoke screen to distract from their fundamental function as reward objects for those authors' male protagonists; their "brilliance" is eventually cast as just another feature to make them desirable reward objects, like lustrous hair or large breasts.
The "ooh, another story about a [misunderstood / dominating / quixotic / incomprehensible / christ-figure] genius" thing is generally uninteresting to me as a reader, but when it's about a female character my eyes narrow and the author is on thin ice until they show me they aren't writing a slightly spiffed-up version of neckbeard anime fanfic.
@guyjantic well, then... just don't describe your charachter as a genius? Not sure how we disagree here.
@quidcumque Maybe we don't. Writing a convincing genius is a hard thing to do, from what I've seen in scifi, where many attempts have been made. I don't know how to do it, but I have developed reactions to the annoying ways.
@quidcumque Worth getting from the library or do you think it's too dystopian for me?