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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

Side note: I’ve read enough sci-fi to know that letting rich people live much longer than not rich is a recipe for a dystopian disaster. The world needs incompetent heirs to waste most of their inheritance, otherwise the civilization collapses to some kind of feudal nightmare.

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Reasoning from science fiction isn't a particularly strong approach. And every possible future is distopian - even the present is distopian in a practical sense. We have billions of people who live well below any standard I woudl consider acceptable.

Reasoning from science fiction is just stupid. A story first and foremost has to have conflict: if it doesn't there is no story, and thus all the stories have one.

Science fiction also follows the anxieties of the time it is written in, as well as the conventions of the subgenre it's representing: i.e Star Trek doesn't have drones or remote surveillance really. Though it does accidentally have LLMs (via the concept of holodeck characters).

Sometimes science fiction is well grounded. It isn't science fiction but something like Orwell's Animal Farm is a great example - actually closer to an argument laid out in narrative form.

Great science fiction is grounded in conflict, as is human nature. There is a whole subtext of conflict in this, and other threads about AI: a future of machine oligarchs, of haves and have-nots. Great science fiction, like any great literature, is grounded in a deep understanding and a profound abstraction of humanity. I completely disagree that reasoning by science fiction is stupid, and the proof is in the pudding: science fiction writers have made a few great predictions.

I've read enough sci-fi to know that galaxy-spanning civilisations will one day send 5000 usenet messages a minute (A Fire Upon the Deep), in the far future humans will develop video calls (The Dark Forest) and Muslims will travel into the future to kill all the Jews (Olympos).

Or “dropout regularization”, as they call it in ML

I’m cautiously optimistic that if that tech came about it would quickly become cheap enough to access for normal people.

Altered Carbon!

With how healthcare is handled in America … good luck to poor people getting access to anything like that.

Life extension isn’t happening for minimum 30 years, if ever. Hopefully, maybe it won’t be this bad by then???

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule

What’s a good sci fi book about that?

Yeah imagine progress without the planck quote "science progresses one funeral at a time"

the fi part is fiction

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