When Our Science Fiction becomes Our Reality

"At the front of the room, Chang had told the Waterbaby to watch his right hand, which now held a small green cube. Its head tracked the movement, glass eyes tracking in perfect time. Then, Chang wrapped his hand around the cube, hiding it from sight.

“What is in my left hand,” said Chang.

Pause. “There. Is. Nothing in. Your. Left hand.” Chang closed his left hand, and then held left and right hands together in front of him, the green cube neatly hidden.

“Follow the hand with the green cube,” Chang continued. He moved both hands in opposite circles. Waterbaby diligently tracked the hand with the cube.

“Like magic for really stupid people,” Jim snarked.

“Shut up,” Jo muttered back, with a tired smile."

From the table, Chang picked up a mirror, a flat thirty by forty centimeter rectangle, with a hard black plastic backing. He held it up to the crude face, in front of the glazed lenses.

“What do you see in my hand,” Chang asked.

Pause. Pause. “A. Rectangle.” A longer pause.

“And what do you see in the rectangle?”

Silence. Then, “I see. Nothing. In the. Rectangle.”

Jo shook her head. It was more right than it knew.

FROM THE WATER, p 35

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The recently circulated video of Figure's new OpenAI powered bot stirred a memory of that snippet in my mind yesterday, for obvious reasons.

I wrote that ten years ago, in what was the first of a trilogy of A.I. novels that never found a publisher.  In FROM THE WATER, I explored two ideas.  First, the idea that AGI...Artificial General Intelligence...would only arrive at the point where we moved beyond language models and into A.I. systems that could connect their semiotics to the material world.  Meaning, simply, that words had meaning.  

When we think the word "water," for example, it doesn't simply inhabit a web of linguistic interrelation.  It is "wet," and we know what that means because we can touch it, and taste it, and see it.  We can hear it dripping and splashing and flowing.  

In order to achieve sentience, or so I argued from the basis of my then-reading of early two-thousands A.I. theorists, a system must be able to perceive itself.  Sentience requires the capacity for self-awareness, not simulated, not virtual, but actual.

Secondly, such a neutral network wouldn't be physical.  It wouldn't be a matter of interlaced hardware and chipsets, but a software construct.  In FROM THE WATER, I'd envisioned a virtual network, in which a complex neutral structure was simulated.  But as it turns out, you don't need that.  The complex and probabilistic interconnections within language itself can be pressed into service for that purpose.  They're already neural.  

The advances in A.I. we're seeing right now have met the terms and conditions of the science fiction of the recent past. 

We're at functional Turing compliance with our LLMs.  We're starting to see those constrained intelligences connect to the real world.  There's no reason to believe we're not on the edge of a epochal shift, one brought to us by the same earnestly blindered quants who were convinced that the internet would bring about world peace, and that smartphones were a great idea.  

It's peculiar watching the fiction you've written become reality.

On the Writing of Conservative Science Fiction

Can sci fi be conservative?  

It's typically forward-thinking, after all, because of course it must be.  But does that mean that it must by necessity be progressive?

It does not.  Again, of course not.  Why should it be?

I understand conservatism, in its best sense, to be defined as "holding on to what is good."  Change is not always positive, and the embrace of change...for the conservative...comes only after it has been carefully considered.  Does it lessen the grace in the world?  Does it diminish us, or dominate us, or break us?  Then it is to be avoided.

Much of the greatest science fiction explores this theme.  

Fahrenheit 451, for example.  Or Brave New World.  Or Parable of the Sower.  Or A Clockwork Orange.  Or The Lathe of Heaven.  Or War of the Worlds.  In each of these seminal narratives, the world has changed, but in a way that threatens something fundamentally good about humankind.  Literature.  Liberty.  Not being gassed to death on the regular by Martians.  Those things.

In sci fi as dystopia, the assumption is that the timeline has arced in a maleficent direction, and these stories challenge both the present and the future against the creeping depredations of decay and decadence, of fascist brutality and mechanistic inhumanity.  It is a critique of both a possible future and the bitter seed of said future in the present.

As an author, many of my novels explore this.  My postapocalyptic Amish fiction, for example, explores the place of a deeply-held and authentic faith as a bulwark against the collapse of the saeculum.  My AI uprising narratives...those that haven't already been dated by the great onrush of AI these days...explore how a culture that does not provide purpose and meaning can prime us for totalitarianism.  My current work in progress, which fits neatly into the Cyberutopian Regency Action/Romance genre?  Its core theme is the necessity of tradition and discipline for the maintenance of cultural and personal integrity.  

These are conservative things.

Atheist Storytelling and the Sublime

Over the winter break, I read.  First, my first full novel on my new Kindle.  Then, the excellent new book by the former pastor of my church, followed by a second novel on Kindle.   Although only one of the books approached spirituality intentionally, I got some spiritual food out of all of my reading.

It's an observer effect, perhaps, representative of the universe I inhabit.   The waveform of almost any narrative I encounter collapses into some rumination on faith and meaning.   Both of the other novels I read were hard sci-fi, a favorite genre, in which the imaginings of the author are shaped by projections of future realities that are grounded in actual science.  The second of the books was an interesting rumination on the meaning of human identity in a world where the capacity to store a full neural map and transfer it to another body.  What does self mean if divorced from a single body?  Altered Carbon...a fusion of hard sci fi and pulp-noire...was well written and crafted, but ended up being a bit too sexual and ultra-violent for my tastes.

But the first was The Hydrogen Sonata, the latest novel by one of my longstanding favorite sci fi authors: Ian M. Banks.  My physicist father-in-law introduced me to him years ago, and it's been a good acquaintance.  His hard-sci-fi is delightful hoo-hah space opera goodness, all rooted in a pan-galactic society called the Culture.  He tells ripping good yarns that include both finely wrought characters and impossibly vast scopes, set firmly into the kind of plausible universe that doesn't make physicists cringe.   In that storytelling, Banks is a consistent critic of religion, as faith within the boundaries of the Culture is consistently represented as the realm of the manipulative, the weak-witted and the primitive.

But hey...a good story is a good story.  I can cut him some slack.

And yet, with all of his critiques, there's a peculiar religiosity within his books.  That goes beyond the machina ex machina endings that he's very fond of, as some astoundingly advanced species/entity suddenly brandishes a heretofore unanticipated Clarke's Third Law technology to plot-resolving effect.

Banks also integrates the concept of transcendence into his novels, as societies and individuals of particularly advanced tech or knowledge abandon our time and space for a realm of being called "The Sublime," in which the limitations of four-dimensional reality are removed.  "Subliming" was a concept explored at great length in this latest novel...and as that concept was explored, it felt more like reading the meditations of a mystic or a lama.  It was all mystery and paradox, described in terms that were more the stuff of faith.

Perhaps, just as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from religion.