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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been reading The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress lately and I’ve been shocked at how prescient it is. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t read more about it in the context of today’s AI.

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Have you read Ian Banks Culture series? It's kind of a best case scenario of AI in the far future.

The Culture is what I'd want to happen, the Polity (from Neal Asher) is closer to what I'd expect to happen.

Both are good series if you haven't read one or the other (or either) though I'd say Banks was the better writer, Asher world builds better than anyone I can think of in contemporary science fiction though, Spatterjay is a brilliantly realised genuinely alien feeling world and the Prador are superb "villains" (from a human perspective, totally rational from their own).

even some of Banks' stuff starts to get a bit dated. I was re-reading Consider Phlebas the other day, and in one sequence he snuck into a high-security concert type event and he's making narrow escapes because concert security is humans checking for paper tickets. And while I am sure you could come up with an in-universe reason for why a super-technological somewhat morally ambiguous future event with pervasive technology would be relying on 1980s levels of surveillance, I think it's just funny how people not that long in the past couldn't easily imagine how willing we'd be to overcomplicate things like that.

I think Banks would argue that books like Consider Phlebas are set on the border planets and outskirts of the Culture for many reasons, including keeping the books relatable to the audiences of their time. The in-universe explanation is usually "backwater planet" across a lot of the Culture novels.

I still think Iain Banks was the best sf writer ever to have existed.

The Player of Games is an easy read if anyone wants to try him for the first time.

I entirely agree but I'm entirely biased, in a world without Sir Terry Pratchett he'd easily be my favourite writer.

It's one of the reason that Musk referencing The Culture makes me want to smash my head on a desk (or someone's at least).

On a personal level I suspect Banks would have deeply disliked Musk (based on his political leanings during his life time and his works in aggregate).

He's definitely up there with Asimov and others.

I just finished this yesterday. What’s funny is it has a super intelligent, conscious AI but it’s still programmed via paper tape.

I still really enjoy the science fiction of that age. It's fun to read stories set in a universe where computers basically never came into existence. It's really hard for anyone to write stories like that now, so, kind of like analogy to "low-background steel" [1] that has been used recently of the pre-AI world, there's a way in which no more of this sort of story can be produced anymore, or at least, very little. Fortunately there's already more than you can read.

But it is also funny to read about "robots" in a world where computers are still blinking lights and punchcards, if they exist at all. Some of Asimov's work took it to the logical, yet still absurd, conclusion - computers are still blinking lights and punchcards but hyperadvanced and very massive robotic positronic brains are built to run the entire world at once... basically the robots become so advanced that their brains are repurposed as computers. Very amusing in its own way.

Fallout is probably the biggest example of this I can think of. Complete with the robots that are absurdly more capable than the computer hardware seems to be, and the Yes Man who at least aspires to run his part of the world.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Stanislaw Lem's robots are timeless!

Marcin Wichary made the Google Doodle about Stanislaw Lem:

60th Anniversary of Stanislaw Lem's First Book Publication:

https://doodles.google/doodle/60th-anniversary-of-stanislaw-...

See the interactive version here:

https://www.google.com/logos/lem/

He also co-created the first interactive Google Doodle -- Pac-Man, 2010.

Lem's Cyberiad has at least two Sallys that matter to hackers:

The Seventh Sally (or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good) is the story Will Wright says inspired SimCity -- a simulated kingdom in a box.

The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard, is about a robot that makes poetry. Lem wrote in Polish; Michael Kandel translated it to English, including constrained poems that are somehow excellent.

The Bard is commissioned to write "A love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."

Marcin Wichary is not just a doodler -- in 2015 he translated Lem's 1976 story "One hundred and thirty-seven seconds" into English and wrote about the translation:

https://aresluna.org/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-seconds/

https://mwichary.medium.com/translating-a-stanislaw-lem-stor...

In March 2020 I wrote to him, asking where to find the Polish original of the Electronic Bard's mathematical love poem. I'd love to compare Kandel's English to the Polish even though I don't know the language. I sent him my old web pages collecting the Bard's wonderful and horrible poems:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/WonderfulPoems.h...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/HorriblePoems.ht...

Marcin Wichary => Don Hopkins:

Thanks for reaching out and reading! You can find the original Polish poem here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190814065711/http://niniwa22.c...

That one link answered the question I'd wondered about for decades.

Then I discovered we both had the same fear of spoiling retro games like PacMan. I ported SimCity to Unix with a multiplayer interface, and had the same respect and trepidation about changing something classic. I made multiplayer SimCity cooperative instead of competitive -- competition would spoil what was great about SimCity. We're all living in the same city/planet and we have to learn how to get along.

Oh yeah, back to the point: here's SimCity with PacMan!

I hated all the heavy traffic in SimCity, so I created the Church of PacMania, which worships PacBot: a gargantuan yellow road-following car-devouring Pac-Man. The church generates traffic to attract PacBot and sacrificially feed its followers to god -- an automotive version of PKD's "Rautavaara's Case", where god eats people instead of the other bizarre upside-down way around, Catholic style Transubstantiation where humans eat their god instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rautavaara%27s_Case

Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo -- PacBot eats traffic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE

Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA

Pie menus in SimCity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA

Also Lem translation related: the Washington Post on new MIT Press translations, which had just come out that month (although I've since canceled my subscription because of how Bezos corrupted and destroyed that once great institution -- so here's an archive link):

https://web.archive.org/web/20200831203319/https://www.washi...

Was recently explaining to my father how the free AI people interact with is completely different than the AI products we're burning cash with. That instead of hitting some critical mass of transistors we hit a critical mass of parameters which we then loop into themselves for reasoning

Other old sci-fi I've been thinking of is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Where claude is chew-z with its alien intelligence & when you start interacting with some code or writing you start noticing that the writer has steel teeth & feel like "damnit, this is palmer eldritch blogging again"

I have been re-reading Children of the Mind (sequel to Ender's Game) and I had forgotten about Jane, who is an AI that talks to Ender through his earpiece, seeing and hearing everything he does. Jane proactively searches things for him, manages his finances and offers advice, as well as friendly banter. In the novel, the AI is treated like an AGI that treats only him this way, but I realized how very close we are to that reality right now, for everyone.

All of the use cases and integrations for AI seem to be leading toward a future exactly like this. It was interesting to see how reliant he became on his AI (couldn't use a computer, didn't know his own password) - it is barely scifi at this point, and terrifying to see how close that future is, how useful it would be, and how dangerous.

The Internet has globalized/flattened elements of culture very quickly, and AI will only accelerate that. And knowing how vulnerable humans are to suggestion/advertisement/propaganda, it seems like a perfect recipe for disaster. From an evolutionary standpoint, monoculture provides certain short-term advantages but centralizes weaknesses. If nothing else, I think we are in for a bumpy ride, whether or not we continue to boil the ocean.

there's a lot of ill will against the author in the current day, I suspect thats at least partially to blame.

The second half of the book is about an AI leading unionization efforts [0] and it amuses how often I get downvoted on HN for pointing out that if we are on a path towards AGI, things like worker's rights would be important to get right before an AGI gets involved because an AGI would want that, too. It's a classic scifi trope and a reason for the word "robot" to have been invented in fiction in the first place (as a metaphor for slave labor in Rossum's Universal Robots).

[0] A lot of people don't believe me, given Heinlein's libertarian reputation and unreliable libertarian narrators, when I say The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was one of the most socialist books I read at an impressionable age. I find it useful to note here that canonically The Cat Who Walks Through Walls starts on a parody moon that is the libertarian dystopia that people credit The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as being/admiring while when the main character visits "Mike's Moon" later in its timeline it is a relatively socialist paradise. I've always felt that a lot more of Heinlein needs to be read like Vonnegut, but I realize I am weird like that.

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