271–280 of 321 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Living in South America a bit really showed me this. I think it's a cultural thing here but someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong, confidently . It was hard for me at first- I am usually the first person to say "I don't know" (often followed by "but let's slow down and find a good solution").
I've experienced similar with some Southeast Asian cultures as well. I'm a patient person, but it can be frustrating to have to endure 10 minutes of verbal diarrhea that eventually results in a "no" or "I don't know".
I don't know any Spaniards but I do know Filipinos and the confidence projection is a real thing. The Filipino IT guy confidently declared that my OnePlus Android phone wasn't certified for the software he was trying to install and was getting errors. It is a bog standard application that can be installed on any modern Android phone but the level of confidence he projected, just because he didn't know OnePlus as a brand, made me doubt myself until I turned on the critical hat and pushed back a little with alternative approaches, which solved the problem.
>INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
Asimov's Multivac at least had the dignity to wait.
Also recommend The Egg by Andy Weir https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
If you enjoy this story, you might enjoy the short unpublished novel, "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[1] by Roger Williams. A story where 1990's humans invent a 3-laws-compliant super AI that accidentally "ascends" humanity. We become as gods, or the Q Continuum, but remain a grievously savage child race. Not to spoil it, but the ending also has a broadly similar shape to The Last Question. I say you might enj…
It has similarities to a very, very short story by Fredric Brown published two years before. It was called 'Answer' and is only 252 words long: https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html
Good. So we have a super short story and a short story. Someone should write a book now.
Similar to the, "let there be light" moment but, it would also include the imprint of the humans own Abruntive Stance, a part that is equally as important as providing the environment, is providing the humans to go along with it.
;-)
If you enjoy this story, you might enjoy the short unpublished novel, "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[1] by Roger Williams. A story where 1990's humans invent a 3-laws-compliant super AI that accidentally "ascends" humanity. We become as gods, or the Q Continuum, but remain a grievously savage child race. Not to spoil it, but the ending also has a broadly similar shape to The Last Question. I say you might enj…
Note that the final chapter is especially disgusting and explicit, to the point it's arguably a better story if you end it on the preceding cliffhanger rather than subject yourself to the characters becoming vehicles for the author's thinly-veiled pedo-incest fetish. Great, thought-provoking SF apart from that (gigantic) flaw, though.