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Accelerando (2005)

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Re: Accelerando (2005)

#101

Post by Ancapistani »

jdr23bc wrote: post #59
sohex wrote: post #37

Accelerando and The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (and that series as a whole) are the best examples of how weird the future is going to get I’ve read. Other series like The Culture are amazing too, but the aforementioned feel possible in a way that others don’t. For me, I can see the causal chains leading from here to there vividly in a way that you don’t get with a lot of other sci-fi. That combination of plausi…

Blindsight's near future predictions are also looking more reasonable (aside from the vampires maybe)

I read Blindsight three times, and I’m still not sure what happened…

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#102

Post by EvanAnderson »

mullingitover wrote: post #86
btreecat wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-expands-c... FTA >WASHINGTON, May 12 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence company Anthropic on Tuesday released an expanded suite of features for lawyers using its Claude AI assistant, including tools for specialized legal topics and access within Claude to other legal research and AI products.

I stand by my prediction that when AI comes for the lawyers' jobs, that's when suddenly we'll have the Butlerian Jihad.

Not lawyers-- judges. Judges, in my experience, don't take kindly to anything or anyone infringing on their power.

Edit: I've met a ton of attorneys who are bullish on LLMs preparing work for them (kinda like robo-paralegals, albeit ones apt to spout bullshit). Judges, being human (and lazy by dint of evolution), would probably lean on LLM-based analysis too. I cannot imagine they'd ever stand by and let decisions be made by a non-judge.

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#104

Post by bombcar »

Ancapistani wrote: post #99
SonnyTark wrote: post #19

Accelerando has prophecies that are coming true and it's scary. Spoiler warning in case you want to read it. The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's…

I was turned on to this book by an HN commenter a few months ago. Since then, it’s become something between a goal and a fear that one day I’ll get to the point where I wonder how much of my consciousness is me versus how much has been pushed off to my agent. It’s already a lot closer than I expected to ever experience.

How much of our short and long term memory is already relegated to smart phones?

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#105

Post by bombcar »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #69
SonnyTark wrote: post #19

Accelerando has prophecies that are coming true and it's scary. Spoiler warning in case you want to read it. The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's…

> and verdicts are delivered by AI courts Yeah, I don't see that one. I don't see the legal system, the one that has people with guns to back it, giving up authority to an AI or a group of AIs.

The courts can almost entirely be bypassed by arbitration agreements.

Look for AI arbitration sooner rather than later.

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#106

Post by spellboots »

lxgr wrote: post #67
growt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more fitting is the part of the story where a collective of uploaded lobster minds are involved. I wonder if that was an inspiration for the "OpenClaw" name somehow or just pure coincidence.

The fact that the OpenClaw creators seemingly missed that parallel tells you everything you need to know about the project.

All I need to know about the project is that the creators didn't read a relatively obscure SciFi book from 2005?

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#107

Post by cwillu »

nozzlegear wrote: post #81
collingreen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few current situations that are leaning this way in theme: - ai facial recognition used by police, detaining innocent people with no recourse or consequences - ai military decisions made without human in the loop. Double points for the decisions being to kill someone. Anthropic insisting a human should be in the loop for killing decisions is what caused Trump to declare them a supply chain risk. - ai denial of insu…

> It will be very hard (and only get harder) for humans to fight through the deluge of slop, especially if the slop is weaponized as a kind of DoS like in the book. I don't expect laws are strong enough to hold this back but I don't know any other tool in our collective toolboxes. We don't need to fret about finding a technical solution to slop in the real world. Courts have a mechanism to fight this kind of thing (o…

“Binding arbitration: The parties agree to surrender their rights to litigate under this provision.”

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#108

Post by Ogre »

GolfPopper wrote: post #39
yomismoaqui wrote: post #21

Sorry to hijack the topic (slightly), but after reading all books from The Culture by Iain M. Banks I'm looking for similar Sci-fi. Any recommendations?

Nobody is quite like Banks. Some of the closest would likely be: Charles Stross' various SF, especially the space opera-adjacent stuff. (He has an large range. Merchant Princes and Laundry series are good, but not at all along the lines of Banks.) Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Saga . Vernor Vinge's three Zones of Though books. David Brin's Uplift series. Perhaps Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series. Max Glad…

The Merchant Princes series is fun, and I really enjoy the story of why he wrote it. It starts out as fantasy for basically the whole first novel and then some. But you can find some evidence from the start that it's really sci-fi, and by the end of the series it has dropped all pretense. It's sci-fi through and through.

This is all because he had an exclusive contract for sci-fi with his other publisher. But not an exclusive contract period. So he stealth wrote a second sci-fi series without actually breaking that contract until later.

I'm not sure if The Laundry Files was done for the same reason. It's possible. I haven't read those past the first novel. But I'm a big fan of everything else he's done.

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#109

Post by underlipton »

spellboots wrote: post #106
lxgr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the OpenClaw creators seemingly missed that parallel tells you everything you need to know about the project.

All I need to know about the project is that the creators didn't read a relatively obscure SciFi book from 2005?

I would feel the same about anyone working in augmented/virtual reality who hadn't read "Rainbows End" or watched any number of XR-focused anime.

What do you mean, you can't come up with anything to do with these devices? What do you mean, you're hiring webdevs to make another Snap filter? If you're on the cutting edge, I would expect that your knowledge base includes niche, related texts.

Re: Accelerando (2005)

#110

Post by cstross »

utilityhotbar wrote: post #20

This was written in 2005(!) -> > Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?" > "Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download…

This was written in 2005(!) ->

No, I wrote that in 1998. It was published as the novelette "Lobsters" in Asimov's SF Magazine in 2002, made the Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 2003 (it didn't win), and later became the opening of the novel published in 2005.

I emphasized: the direction things were going in was obvious in the late 90s.

And don't *ever* let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.

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