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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

I read too much scifi, and almost none of it has updated on the current state of AI. For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency.

If scifi authors aren't keeping up it's hard to expect the rest of us to. But the macro and micro economic changes implied by this technology are huge. Very little of our daily lives will be undisrupted when it propagates and saturates the culture, even with no further fundamental advances.

Can anyone recommend scifi that makes plausible projections around this tech?

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> For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters.

This is largely a function of what science fiction you read. Military SF is basically about retelling Horatio Hornblower stories in space, and it has never been seriously grounded in science. This isn't a criticism, exactly.

But if you look at, say, the award-winning science fiction of the 90s, for example you have A Fire Upon the Deep, the stories that were republished as Accelerando, the Culture novels, etc. All of these stories assume major improvements in AI and most of them involve breakneck rates of technological change.

But these stories have become less popular, because the authors generally thought through the implications of (for a example) AI that was sufficiently capable to maintain a starship. And the obvious conclusion is, why would AI stop at sweeping the corridors? Why not pilot the ship? Why not build the ships and give them orders? Why do people assume that technological progress conveniently stops right about the time the robots can mop the decks? Why doesn't that technology surpass and obsolete the humans entirely?

It turns that out that humans mostly want to read stories about other humans. Which is where many of the better SF authors have been focusing for a while now.

This reminds me of my favorite note [1] from Ursula Le Guin on technology:

> Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too.

> Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

[1] https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology

Plausible SF plot: some (sort of) humans cobayes try to escape the robots biotech shiplab.

While it doesn’t touch on AI at all (that I remember, I think there is some basic ship AI but it’s not a major plot point and it never “talks”) the Honor Harrington series is “Horatio Hornblower in space” and I highly recommend it.

Also I love the Zones of Thought series and The Culture.

Yeah that tracks. If we're being real, there won't ever be much of actual human exploration beyond Earth, it'll all be done with fully automated systems. We're just not physically made for the radiation and extremely long periods of idle downtime. Star Wars has the self-awareness to call itself fantasy as some kind of exception, even though 99% of all other other sci-fi is pretty much that too.

Seeing drones do all the work unfortunately isn't very interesting though.

Vernor Vinge has argued that far-future SF makes no sense because of the "wall across the future" that The Coming Technological Singularity will create. [0]

If you're open to Theory Fiction, you can read Nick Land. Even his early 1990s texts still feel futuristic. I think his views on the autonomization of AI, capital, and robots - and their convergence - are very interesting. [1]

[0] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

[1] https://retrochronic.com/

In The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler there are fleets of fishing boats that are all controlled by AI to maximize the catch. Each boat also has it's own AI that can act somewhat independently, but they all communicate with the main corporate AI as well as with other boats in the vicinity. Initially the boats are all fully automated and have robots doing all the work, but in the ocean environment the robots tend to break down a lot due to corrosion. At some point the AI in charge of the fleet figures out that it can use kidnapped humans in place of the robots. The humans are kidnapped and drugged so that they don't wake up until the ship is well out at sea. Even after that they're kept drugged to some extent so that they aren't inclined to escape. They're given just enough food to enable them to do their work and no more. When they become sick they're thrown overboard and new kidnappees replace them.

This is just one of the side plots of the book, I think it could've been the whole plot of a book.

Of course, we already live in this reality - just substitute "Corporation" for "AI".

Oooh edgyyyyyy comment! Truly you are awake and the rest of us are asleep.

Tell me, which corporation exactly is kidnapping and drugging people to enslave them and then discard their bodies at sea to feed the capitalist global machine?

It seems like you have a big scoop if you are doing on the ground reporting, because that seems like it would be international news if it was real!

Actually, as bizarre as it sounds, drugging and kidnapping people to enslave them on fishing boats is a real problem, and has been reported on by the international news.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-nov-12-2...

https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/seafood-from-slaves/2015/...

In reality, this practice long predates modern corporations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghaiing)

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

The sun is dying. A capable team is assembled and put into cryosleep in an automated ship for a journey to a neighboring star system to try to diagnose the problem. Only one member survives, and they have amnesia.

The novel does a great job of explaining the process of troubleshooting under pressure and with incomplete information.

I love this book almost as much as The Martian but I don't think it fits OP's need? The tech in PHM isn't much advanced from today.

That's fair, the medical bot was about as competent as today's tech.

Iain M Banks - Culture novels.

Strong warning: Start with either book 2 (Player of Games) or book...7, Look to Windward.

I strongly suggest you skip book 1 until you're comfortable with the rest of the books that focus on the Culture itself, and not some weird offshoot story that barely involves the Culture.

I also thought about the Minds in the Culture novels. That universe has many gradations of artificial brains.

Though I wouldn't recommend starting with any of the stories in the series. Or reading any at all. Find a summary or a Cliff's Notes instead. Iain M Banks has a talent for making great stories tedious.

Strongly recommend murderbot diaries (starts with "All systems red").

Has a cyborg/AI as protagonist and paints a really interesting world with AIs and synthetic biology in it. Also does a good job at just shutting up about things it can not talk about, like interplanetary travel.

It's not that they don't keep up, and more that it's hard to make a truly compelling and exciting space opera story it you abide by the reality of physics. The reality of space travel and war will be much closer to the forever war than to the countless water navy inspired stories out there.

Ian Banks' Culture series is the only one that comes to mind.

Yeah it really makes you think about what life would be like if intelligence could infuse anything- be it a ship or a datapad- even if his vision wasn't quite how I imagine it would turn out.

I've also seen it suggested that Harry Potter might be a more realistic look at what proliferated AI might be like.

The problem is it's hard to tell compelling stories without people.

Stories for robots by robots

"Will the security update finish before we're discovered and killed by the hunter seeker, stay tuned to find out more!"

Basically, Murderbot.

Murderbot diaries is sooo good.

It does such a good job building a convincing world, and its really good in just not going into details that it can't speak on (like how interplanetary travel works), while some of it's takes (e.g. small anti-personel drones) seem almost prescient after Ukraine.

All the synthetic biology and even the depictions of AIs and their struggles are really compelling, too.

Nah, stories for robots by robots would probably be more like "can we gently and patiently explain to humans that all their problems come from their own lack of understanding without them turning on us"

Greg Egan is a master of this (making compelling hard scifi stories where the characters aren't the great american novel quality, still fine though).

diaspora by greg egan is a good example

There's a lot of fun stories about transforming robots but people tend to age out of them.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams does a great job at being a timeless and priceless way to learn about the relativity of things.

I found Vernor Vinge is spot on. I recommend focusing on recent work. E.g. the Bobiverse (https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse) by Denis E. Taylor is a super easy read that touches on that. He takes a shortcut in early books by capping the progress in US via turning the country into a theocracy and then a bad WWIII that wiped out most of the mankind. Note that I haven't read the latest books, but even the previous ones are full of automation and humans are "ephemerals" - they don't live long. I am recently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of time series. It goes beyond AI and mind uploading, expanding into biotech, the next big deal. With the right understanding of proteins and DNA/RNA, hacking living things is way easier than creating robots, as they self-repair, replicate, feed themselves, recycle things effectively, create ecosystems. The only reason we are not doing it is because our understanding of these mechanisms is very shallow.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Blindsight. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it is a book about the place of human intelligence in a universe with other options, both biological and artificial.

Agency by William Gibson slightly predates the current AI bubble, but it does an interesting job of working an AI chatbot into its plot.

Dan Simmons' books often include AI plot elements and contemplate the consequences of humans becoming overly reliant on AI such that they lose basic competencies.

A bit of a jump but have a look at Pantheon the tv series, it is on Netflix at the moment. Based on a book by Ken Liu, the end of the series, blew my mind.

> Can anyone recommend scifi that makes plausible projections around this tech?

Unironically, Wall-E. Humans leave earth behind on a ship where everything is automated.

> Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency.

This seems like it's rooted in reality.

I'd agree if you replace "knowledge" with "judgement". It seems to me that mere knowledge will become embedded in our environment.

No matter how well documented system us, how helpful error message is or how good self diagnostics are - some humans will act dumb. Access to knowledge (I assume by embedded you mean better access) is clearly not enough.

I'm guessing it'll only be a matter of time before we see more stories about AI. For example, a spaceship that crashes into strange planets killing the humans on board because AI hallucinated, resulting in a civilization of aliens built around the combined wisdom of every youtube comment and facebook post that the surviving AI was trained on creating the largest and most destructive religion/dumpster fire in the universe.

It's pretty normal for it to take a few years to write a good book so I wouldn't look to science fiction to keep up to date on the latest tech hype train. This is probably a good thing because when the hype dies down or the bubble bursts, those books would often end up looking very dated and laughably naive.

There's a lot of books about AGI already which is probably more fun to write about than what passes for AI right now. Still, I'm sure that eventually we'll see characters getting their email badly summarized in fiction too.

> If scifi authors aren't keeping up

My brother in Christ, ChatGPT blew up just 25 months ago. Give it time.

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