Douglas Adams’s parody of Multivac gave us The Answer, so it’s nice to see this here… :)
I prefer 42 to this madness
The Last Question
81–90 of 169 posts
Re: The Last Question
#82I read all of Asimov before age 12. Good old multivac.
Scifi, mysteries, and non-fiction?
Re: The Last Question
#83The deification of computers seems woven in to culture in invisible ways now. Along with it comes centralisation and ultimately a fusion into a singularity. There are people, who deep in their hearts don't want individual tools to expand and improve themselves, but something new to kneel down and pray to. I place this struggle squarely on the humanist anti-humanist axis.
People just want their prayers to be answered.
It's not unique to the Singularity. Another common trope is, when God doesn't answer, people turn to the Devil or Cthulhu. When medicine fails to provide a miracle, they turn to magic crystals.
Re: The Last Question
#84Re: The Last Question
#85Re: The Last Question
#86Re: The Last Question
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s an atheist’s most religious dream to think of becoming one’s own creator. It’s nonsense, of course, but it definitely blew my mind reading it as a child. What set the parameters that the ultimate computer must work within? The ultimate computer can reverse entropy, but it can’t make its own reality. There are limits to the power of knowledge.
I think the issue is that Asimov uses "hyperspace" as a get-out-of-jail-free card for anything that seems to contradict physics. Faster than light travel? Possible through hyperspace. Infinitely powerful computers? Can exist in hyperspace.
Quite true, but that's not something unique to Asimov. Applied Phlebotinum [1] is a common device in Science Fiction whenever the science can't support a plot device required by the fiction (SF narratives are stories in the first place, after all). There's even a trope specifically for how hyperspace and subspace are used in that way.[2]
[1] https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Applied_Phlebotinu...
Re: The Last Question
#88[deleted]
Re: The Last Question
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s an atheist’s most religious dream to think of becoming one’s own creator. It’s nonsense, of course, but it definitely blew my mind reading it as a child. What set the parameters that the ultimate computer must work within? The ultimate computer can reverse entropy, but it can’t make its own reality. There are limits to the power of knowledge.
Creator in what sense though? Evolution is slow enough that there was never one point at which we suddenly came into being. First we were energy, then we were energy forming into chemicals, then we were chemicals forming into chemicals with rigid structures, then we were chemicals with rigid structures forming more complex structures, etc, until we got to here. Each iteration creates the next iteration, constantly, a…
> It's mobius bagels all the way down.
Now that's a fun phrase!
Re: The Last Question
#90If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. It’s easy to google and pretty short. Isaac Asimov said it was his favorite story he’d written. He imagines the entire history of the future of humanity, to the end of time, in a few pages. Really a marvelous story.
>If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. Read it from the original publication: https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se... >
Interesting, the text on those scans is selectable, can anyone share how this is done is it a custom font? It does not seem so as the same letter appears to be rendered differently showing printing/scan artifacts. Maybe some styling?