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Comment by skinnyarms | Hacker News Reader

Side note: Statements like that paragraph drive me absolutely batty. There have been tons of novels, novellas, movies, comics, YouTube videos, poems (yep) imagining all sorts of aspects of the singularity.

How fast it comes on How this was no warning How there was lots of warning How we shoulda known How nobody coulda known How it completely takes over society immediately About the long drawn out wars fought for it to take over society How society splits between those under it's affects, and those not How prevalent the effects are How exclusive the effects are How big, how small etc, etc, etc

There are billions of humans out there right now, imagining all manner of things, and it's irritating to me to see all the hand wringing over the "Nobody stopped to think if they should". Lots of people did, and are, asking that question.

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I think it's wrong for a much more profound reason: what Knuth describes as an aberration is, like, 90% of all AI in science fiction, ever. They are almost all human or sub-human, with only the occasional god-like AI (carefully rendered irrelevant). Singularity-style SF is rare, in part because authors really want to write human-centric stories, and because a true Singularity SF story is quite difficult to write. (As Vinge was so memorably told when he tried some of the first: "you aren't smart enough to write this story. No one is.") So, you can fit pretty much the entire corpus on a screen or two: some Vinge, some Stross, some Rajaniemi, some Brin, maybe some Stanislaw Lem or Olaf Stapledon if you're feeling historical/generous... As opposed to 'mundane' AI which is probably the last SF fiction you read and then the dozen before that too.

Maybe I have weird taste but I seem to read a lot of sci-fi where superhuman superintelligence is central to the plot. In addition to the great examples you gave in Vinge and Stross, Banks and Watts come to mind.

The most famous "weakly godlike" AI entities are probably the Culture Minds (RIP I.M. Banks). Or ar least they’re supposed to be weakly godlike. In practice they never seem to do anything that a bunch of particularly smart humans couldn’t do, besides being exceedingly parallel, being able to, say, carry a conversation with a hundred million people at the same time. Indeed, they weren’t even able to predict that a certain agent of theirs, a highly effective warrior, would go and win a war that he was (unknowingly) supposed to lose. Never mind being able to figure out his true identity, or at least entertain the possibility given what they knew about him.

Some stories that come to mind...

Accelerando Charles Stross https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

Stress again has Singularity Sky which has a minor character as a weakly godlike AI (which is explored much more as a character in the sequel Iron Sunrise (the third book in the series is not to be written - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/09/books-i-... ))

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams (aside: it has a mention of the Vingean Singularity):

> “I and my confederates,” Aristide said, “did our best to prevent that degree of autonomy among artificial intelligences. We made the decision to turn away from the Vingean Singularity before most people even knew what it was. But—” He made a gesture with his hands as if dropping a ball. “—I claim no more than the average share of wisdom. We could have made mistakes.”

There's the classic Asimov - The Last Answer

There's a nacesant one in True Names by Vinge (the post singularity in Marooned in Realtime doesn't have any AIs) https://ia801004.us.archive.org/0/items/truenamesvingevernor...

And digging fairly deep into my library, I'll also make mention of The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld.

There's a lot of smart AI in sci-fi - but things that that gets close to flirting with the singularity are indeed a rarity.

Almost all of this is just brand engagement with tech company marketing.

More detail. They have positioned themselves as being too powerful. Think about how ridiculous that is, and at odds with everything else we know about the industry. They love it. They want YouTubers warning about how cool their tech is. They want the CEOs to philosophize about whether self driving is ethical with their friends.

It’s the plastic bag wrapped around the drain cleaner - making you think it’s so acidic and powerful it has to be carefully controlled.

But it’s all just marketing and completely unnecessary and to plumber would even bother.

There have been many but none I know of have predicted what we are experiencing now.

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